What Happens after the Primal Burn? Dissonance in Sonic Youth’s Middle Period

Sonic Youth originated in No Wave, a movement from the late 1970s and early 1980s that reduced rock to minimal gestures and explored extremes of noise. In the mid-1980s, Sonic Youth’s style changed as they began to incorporate guitar parts that were reminiscent of 1970s hard rock. But their experimental tendencies persisted through this change, because they overlaid the parts in ways that created incongruity and tweaked hard-rock stylistic features in order to create dissonance or tonal conflict. Sonic Youth’s strategies for twisting hard-rock norms into clashing harmonies often follow one of two recurring types. The first, tonic divergence, occurs when separate lines have phase-mismatched tonic harmonies. The second, intervallic dissonance, occurs when instrumental lines are arranged in order to highlight harshly dissonant intervals or chromatic clusters. In many songs, their dissonant counterpoint works in tandem with their characteristic noisy guitar timbres by occurring in alternation, forcing listeners to continually re-evaluate how they perceive a song as a standard rock track. The analyses show how the band continued to experiment within popular style and created types of dissonance that influenced 1980s–1990s guitar-based indie rock.

New York Waltzes

This chapter examines Beyer's solo piano pieces. The titles for her three major piano suites—Gebrauchs-Musik, Dissonant Counterpoint, and Clusters—derive from techniques in the air during the mid-1930s. Beyer's Gebrauchs-Musik (1934) consists of five short, mostly two-voice pieces. The undated Dissonant Counterpoint likewise explores repeating and evolving rhythmic patterns, as well as additive rhythm ideas, expanding the length of individual measures within an ametrical setting and creating discretely separate phrase structures similar to techniques used in her clarinet suites. Like much of Beyer's music, these pieces frequently include difficult polyrhythms. Indeed, the pieces in these suites tend to alternate between a quick, rhythmic style and a slow, static one.

Sonatas, Suites, and String Quartets

This chapter examines Beyer's instrumental chamber works and pieces for symphony orchestra or large ensemble. Beyer's two suites for solo clarinet, composed in 1932, are landmark works of dissonant counterpoint and modernist formalism. These clarinet suites are compositionally intricate and virtuosic in their demands. These are important in their theoretical implications, and they started Beyer down a path of writing a number of pieces for woodwinds. Meanwhile, Beyer composed only two duos for strings and piano: Movement for Double Bass and Piano (1936) and Suite for Violin and Piano (January 1937). She also composed four works for string quartet: String Quartet (1933–34), String Quartet No. 2 (July 1936), Movement for String Quartet (also called Dance for Strings, 1938), and String Quartet IV (undated).

The Origins of “Dissonant Counterpoint”: Henry Cowell's Unpublished Notebook

Housed in the Henry Cowell Papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is Cowell's unpublished notebook that comprises written instructions for using “dissonant counterpoint” along with forty-three exercises. Beyond providing information about the technique during its early development (1914–17), the archival source documents Cowell's active involvement in devising a compositional practice that has heretofore been exclusively attributed to Charles Seeger. The notebook also provides evidence of Cowell's work habits and values that challenge current scholarly depictions of the composer as an undisciplined bohemian. He was a systematic and tenacious innovator who revered tradition as well as experimental techniques. He also placed a strong emphasis on the practical application of new ideas in addition to their theoretical development. These traits account for Cowell's continued advocacy on behalf of dissonant counterpoint that extended well beyond the time he compiled his notebook. From the 1910s to the 1960s he disseminated the technique through his writing, composing, and teaching, and thus provided a life for dissonant counterpoint in American musical culture through the end of the twentieth century. Appendix B contains a full transcription of the notebook.