tension and resolution in music

The structure of music reflects the human brain’s penchant for patterns. Tonal music (that is, most baroque, classical, and romantic music) begins by establishing a melodic pattern by way of the tonic triad. This pattern establishes the key that will frame the song. The brain desperately needs this structure, as it gives it a way to organize the ensuing tumult of notes. A key or theme is stated in a mnemonic pattern and then it is avoided, and then it return, in a moment of consonant repose.

But before a pattern can be desired by the brain, that pattern must play hard to get. Music only excites us when it makes the auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order. If the music is too obvious, if its patterns are always present it is annoyingly boring. This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. The auditory cortex rejoices. It has found the order it has been looking for.

To demonstrate this psychological principle the sociologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the fifth movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, opus 31. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with—but not submission to—expectations of order. He dissected fifty measures of Beethoven’s masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an intricate tonal dance, carefully avoids repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He is its evasive shadow. If E major is the tonic, Beethoven plays incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He preserves an element of certainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

Acccording to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experience (its connotative meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This ¡”embodied meaning” arises from the patterns the symphomy invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. “For the human mind,” Meyer wrote, “such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty.” And so we wait, expectantly, for the resolution of E major, for Beethoven’s established pattern to be completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, “is the whole raison dietre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic.” The uncertainty makes the feeling. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.