Tension and Resolution (feat. Gustav Mahler)

One if not even the most fundamental principles of western (tonal) music is the duality between tension and resolution. This principle can be observed within smallest musical entities like motifs or chord progressions up to the largest extents of musical works like hour long operas and symphonies.

Music that doesn't follow this basic structural duality can quickly either feel disorienting or plain boring. But this whole concept goes much deeper and even has a philosophical side to it that is worth thinking and being aware about. So let's try digging a bit deeper here.

There are basically two different forms of art. One is what we could maybe call as "absolute art" which presents itself in its entirety immediately to the audience. In this category we could put paintings or sculptures. The moment you see it, you are confronted with the entire art piece, there is no "planned in" time factor in this art. Of course it might take time to perceive all the details of it but it is not under control of the artist in which order or time the audience experiences the details of the art piece.

The other form is what we maybe could call "process art" which works with the factor of time. The art piece is not revealed in its entirety right from the start but there is a fixed time frame and order in which the audience is supposed to experience the art piece. This would be anything from literature to theatre, movies and of course, music. It is part of the experience to perceive the art piece over a certain amount of time. This additional dimension of course opens up a lot of possibilities for artistic expression but on the other hand of course has the disadvantage of not providing the immediate accessibility to the art as the first kind.

However, since ancient times in every art form of the second category, the duality between tension and resolution plays a big role. There are several art theories that have been applied for many centuries that all work extensively with this duality.

One of these is "The Hero's Journey" which is a very common structural basis of many narrations. In a nutshell it is the tale of a hero who departs to a journey, goes through a possibly catastrophic conflict or battle to return home victoriously. Or even in a broader structure: the hero departs from a state of relaxation to a state of tension that resolves back to relaxation. This basic structural duality and also the more refined versions that are outlined in the Wikipedia article that is linked above are the basis of an enormous amount of movies, theater plays, musicals, operas, fairy tales, books etc. This basic structural fundament is almost engrained in our DNA as we feel dissatisfied if a story that is being presented to us either by inabilities of the makers or as a conscious concept to break the expectation fails to follow that grand scheme.

And while music usually is more abstract than a narration, we perceive it with a similar expectation.

For a long time, the musical form of a symphony was considered the most dramatic form of purely musical forms. Composers of the romantic period wrote their symphonies with an overarching conceptual approach which was called "Per aspera ad astram" which is a latin phrase which could be losely translated to "Through the darkness (or despair) to the stars (or into the light)" If you listen to for instance Beethoven's symphonies this structure becomes very audible in all of them. It always feels like a conflict or musical battle that eventually resolves to a certain degree.

Being a composer also means to be a storyteller. Maybe not in such a defined way like a writer but music that tends to captivate us always manages to create dramaturgic arcs that feel like a development. 

It of course requires a considerable amount of control over your writing to be able to shape music in such a way but it helps tremendously to be aware of the duality of tension and resolution. As I mentioned at the beginning, music works with this concept not only in the larger scale as we just discussed but also in the small scale. A dominant chord followed by a tonic is a tension that resolves. A theme that moves from f to e over a c major chord is a tension that resolves. There are many more parameters that imply tension and resolution (e.g. a more "biting" texture vs. a more "pretty" texture, loud vs soft, rhythmically active vs rhythmically calm, high vs. low etc.) While this whole basic concept seems to be very straight forward and simple to understand, I feel that it is one of the biggest issues that I see and hear with inexperienced composers.

Very often it seems as if the piece doesn't know where it is going. Just the other day I heard a piece by a hobbyist composer that somehow alternated through its entire length between some sort of "tonic state" and some sort of "dominant state" but never really went to either of the both. It at least to me felt extremely dissatisfying to hear a piece that feels like it wants to follow a structure but somehow got stuck on a plateau of the same degree of "not quite tension but not quite resolution either". In fact, there are countless pieces out there that plateau on the same level of tension for a long time because the composer simply doesn't yet have the skill set to change that or similarly common are pieces that manage to create a dramaturgy but do that in a very jerky way with for instance a sudden burst of dissonance that seems to be coming out of nowhere.

For us as media composers, it is however essential to gain a control over our musical language that goes beyond the ability to create dramatic development as we need to even be able to time a moment of tension or resolution to fit the visuals exactly and are also able to lead to it in a plausible way. Being able to control all parameters of music at the same time to make them all feel like they're contributing to the big idea of the music is incredibly hard and takes years and years of experience but essentially music that manages to line up all these parameters so they all follow the big gesture feels incredibly fulfilling. 

After all that I want to hammer home my argument by a listening recommendation. In case you don't know it yet, spend 25 minutes of your life time listening to the final movement of Gustav Mahler's 3rd Symphony. Really take the time without skipping and let it sink in without looking at your emails and your phone. I had the pleasure of hearing this piece for the first time in a concert hall when I was in my teenage years and somehow ended up with tickets for that concert. I only knew Mahler's 2nd at that time which I experienced for the first time in a similar way and which was probably one of the most influential concert experiences of my life so I knew I was "in for a treat" and the third symphony was a similar epiphany experience for me.

This last movement has unofficially be called the "Ode to Love" though Mahler never used that name for it but it is also completely irrelevant to understand the music. If you listen to the piece, pay attention to the three passages in its course that set up to become a climax and each time stall and break apart in a dissonant, desperate quality (6:40, ca. 13:30 and 16:23). Observe how these three collapses become increasingly closer to each other and increasingly "more destructive". After each of the three waves, the music recovers from the "punch in the gut" but each time it seems like that punch gets more heavy, feeling like after the third one as if the music almost "doesn't make it", as if all hope is lost. Eventually however, the theme resurrects and builds up to an incredibly triumphant finale. And even if this finale pulls every register of triumph, it sure does feel as if the music earned that finale. This whole movement is a textbook example of building tension and releasing it. Besides the three "catastrophic breakdowns" mentioned above, there are extended periods in the piece that gradually build tension or resolve and it is really worth trying to just follow the music under this aspect.

 For the attention span of the internet age, it feels like a slow 25 minute movement is way too much but if you consciously allow yourself to dive into the music, it is an incredibly moving musical story of tension and resolution and shows the power that can be unleashed in this regard if you have music under control as Mahler did.