Encounter III

Delicious Dissonance: Melodic, Harmonic, and Rhythmic Dissonance in the Twentieth Century

with Bruce Adolphe
Friday, August 1
7:30 p.m., Martin Family Hall, Menlo School
Tickets: $35 adult; $15 student

A speck of dust in your eye, a car alarm in the street at night while you are trying to sleep, an elevator stuck between floors, and a flirtatious glance from a stranger—all of that is dissonance. In twentieth-century music, dissonance was liberated, integrated, concentrated, and most definitely celebrated as the key (so to speak) to modernity. But the concept of dissonance is still misunderstood by many listeners. Take a tour of the essential ingredients of the daring new music of the last century, as composer and public radio’s piano puzzlemaster (on American Public Media’s Performance Today) Bruce Adolphe examines dissonant rhythm, melody, and harmony—including musical examples from Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Henry Cowell, and others, with some examples from the visual arts, including work by Picasso.

More Encounters:

Encounter I »
Encounter II »
Encounter IV »