How one chord changed the world: "Tristan" at 150

If you’re a music lover, you may have heard of the so-called “Tristan chord” from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Audiences were stunned to hear this infamous harmony when the opera premiered on June 10, 1865 in Munich, Germany. As Tristan turns 150, let’s take a look at what makes the Tristan chord so unique.

The “Vorspiel,” or Prelude, to Tristan begins with with a “dissonant” chord. The terms “consonance” and “dissonance,” “music” and “noise” are largely subjective. Now, in an era where our ears can enjoy everything from Chopin to Chick Corea, what our modern ears hear as “consonant” or musical may have been considered radically dissonant to the ears of people generals past. To hear the chord, click here.

Then photographers start shooting motion pictures, and colorizing their photographs, and that was the end of painters being able to compete with photographers on a level playing field. The only options they had left was to quit painting and become photographers or motion picture directors, or paint paintings that didn't look like anything realistic--or paint scenes that photographers could not capture, such as how the Surrealists painted the subconscious mind.

Excellent points. I wonder if one could argue for some kind of analogous effect on music from the nearly contemporaneous technology of phonography. Rather than compete with recorded works of previously composed harmonious music, compositions were created more to generate emotion in the listener.

I wonder if one could argue for some kind of analogous effect on music from the nearly contemporaneous technology of phonography. Rather than compete with recorded works of previously composed harmonious music, compositions were created more to generate emotion in the listener.

You're in the right forest, but I think might move the trees a little :-)

Music recording had three effects on music, one intended and two unintended. The intended effect was that people anywhere could listen to the best of classical music at any time, without having to have an orchestra nearby, or learn how to play difficult music oneself.

The first unintended effect is that it added way too much competition on living composers: they no longer had to simply compete with each other, they also had to compete with every dead composer whose music was being recorded, and so to sell themselves to the classical music crowd, they had to distinguish their music from all the music that had gone before. Since they were all huddled in Paris with the painters and sculptors who were producing various forms of abstract art (Cubist, Surrealist, Fauvist, etc.), they started writing abstract music, and then using the arts-media to convince the public that it was the latest classical thing and they should all accept it if they didn't want to be left behind.

The other unintended consequence is that for the first time, people who knew nothing about music could purchase and listen to music on a regular basis. Prior to recordings, if you wanted to hear music in your home you had to play it yourself, meaning you had to learn something about how to read music and how to play music. Now, people who never learned anything about music could buy music, and all they wanted out of their music was, as a student of mine once put it, escape from their crappy lives, entertainment that would make them feel better about what they had to go through as working-class stiffs. And that is how the popular music industry gets started.

The result of all this is that music is trifurcated. There is popular music for all the people who don't know anything about music and don't care, they just want to be entertained and/or drugged by the music. There is traditional classical music (including, today, most jazz, and perhaps Americana) for the middlebrow crowd, people educated enough to appreciate music but not willing to give up on tonality for the most part. Then there is avant-garde classical music (including avant-garde jazz and indie rock) for the intellectual crowd, over-educated people--and I say that as someone with a DMA--who in most cases have lost their common musical sense, thinking, as do most progressive intellectuals, that they can make the world whatever they want it to be simply by saying it is so. They get most of the NEA and NEH funding, and outside of their circle no one ever listens to their music, but they don't care because they are funded, and they know they're smarter than the rest of us anyway.

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