Tensions

Lately, when I go out for my run, I listen frequently to Beethoven’s compositions, especially the 4th, 5th, 7th and (the magnificent) 9th Symphonies. (I have also recently added to the iPod the complete later string quartets--more about them later, After more listening. Oh, and I also recently added Mahler’s Third, because Phillip Roth suggested I do so.) And for some reason I am focused on the idea of ‘tension’ in the music. I like not the tension per se, though it is not exactly unpleasant. I thought first about how tension is created in music, and how the resolution of that tension is so satisfying-- like orgasm. I think tension occurs in a created discrepancy between what the listener expects to hear, how the composer has in the work established expectations and what actually occurs in the music. Or else it occurs (as in conversation, I suppose) in voices agreed upon a topic but without agreement as to its direction. Like the voice of the violins and flutes in conversation but not in concert. I am sure there are formal musical explanations how a composer creates this, but I don’t need to know this right now, though it would be very satisfying to learn this information.
Jokes work on tension, too. And the relief of tension produces laughter. I think a great deal of human life works in the interplay between forces producing tension. Tension often maintains interest! The resolution of tension is satisfying; its prolonged continuance produces discomfort, sometimes extreme. And art too produces tension--I think particularly of Picasso’s Mademoiselles of Avignon--their distorted bodies and visages!
Then, I began to wonder how might a musician or artist or comedian prepare an audience to expect something, and to create the tension by interrupting or delaying expectation. How does the artist know what the audience expects? I think of Dada, and the urinal as art. Of course, there is everything cultural about it: in a country without urinals, a urinal on a wall might appear quite beautiful--especially if was filled with, say, flowers, or food, or pearls, or the bones of sacred animals. Whatever the culture thinks of as comely. I wonder if the beauty is a product of tension: perhaps so, if there is in the environment and/or culture a force in opposition to that urinal on the wall. The resolution of the tension would become an engagement with the art object that would cause the opposition to temporarily, at least, be rendered powerless.
I think this is why I don’t understand 20th century music--I am unfamiliar with the tonal scales and can’t hear anything approximating what I know of music--no tension at all, just noise.
I think there are many ways tension is produced in music and art. I want to start to consider the constructive uses of tension in other aspects of life--and education.