Annotation for Krebs, Harald
Some Extensions of the Concepts of Metrical Consonance and Dissonance
Annotation (by Bill Tilghman):
- Employing the often-encountered strategy of appropriating terms
from pitch theory to describe rhythmic phenomena, Krebs extends
and revises Maury
Yeston's concepts of rhythmic
consonance and dissonance. Using what he feels are the more
appropriate terms metrical consonance and dissonance,
Krebs proposes three main categories, based not
upon arithmetic relationships among the durational units implied
by rhythmic strata, as Yeston suggested, but upon the degree of
alighment of pulses among the metrical levels:
- Consonance: The pulses in two metrical levels are well
aligned, because every pulse in the "higher" level is also a
pulse in the "lower" level. This is what we normally perceive as
a well-formed meter.
- Type A dissonance: The pulses in two metrical levels are not
aligned because the duration of the pulses in one level is not an
integral multiple or division of the duration of the pulses in
the other level. This is the phenomenon to which we normally
refer as "two-against-three,"
"three-against-four," etc.
- Type B dissonance: The pulses in two metrical levels are not
aligned because, while the durations of the pulses in two levels
are identical, the pulses in one level are displaced by some
constant interval from those in the other level. An extended,
unbroken chain of syncopes would be an example of this
phenomenon.
Krebs further distinguishes two kinds of metrical dissonance:
direct (the two dissonant metrical levels are occuring
simultaneously and are literally articulated in the music) and
indirect (the two dissonant levels are juxtaposed, so that the
dissonance results from a level that continues
in the listener's mind from some previous passage, but which is
not still continuing literally in the music). He goes on to
describe the various ways in which metrical consonances and
dissonances can be combined, both vertically and horizontally,
and provides numerous examples of these
combinations from the literature. The author closes with
suggestions of ways in which the concepts developed might be
applied to analyses of compolete works.
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