Striving

A sense of striving towards a goal is apparent in all music.

We find it in the tension from unresolved dissonance,

waiting bar after bar in Wagner’s Tristan for that elusive consonant chord.

In melody, the striving of the seventh for the octave –

or as the Kreitler put it,

“Although the theory of harmony specifies many rules about the formation of

and the connection between chords, it states very little about the dynamism

of the chords themselves. In fact, all it tells us about this point

is that there are only two kinds of chords: dissonant chords

and consonant chords. The dissonant chords are described

as those which stand in need of resolution, while the

consonant chords are described as the resolution

itself. When heard, the dissonant chords

arouse a feeling of

“unrest [and] dissatisfaction, calling for further motion towards something satisfactory”

(Schoen, 1940, p61)

and are experienced as

“harsh and unpleasant…incomplete and unfinal”

(W S Pratt, 1944, p40),

while the consonant chords are pleasant sounds of peace, completion, and relief

(W S Pratt, 1944, p33).

Accordingly the theory of harmony is the code of rules

regulating the creation of chordic tensions and the

production of adequate reliefs.”

(Hans Kreitler and Shulamith Kreitler,

Psychology of the Arts,

Duke Univ Press,

1972)

“Melodies, even those by Schönberg, Webern, and Alban Berg,

delineate a certain scale, and in tonal music, a certain mode and key.

The lowest tone of the scale is perceived as its basis,

or in tonal music, as its tonic.

A melody need not start with its tonic, and a great many do not.

Yet as soon as the tonic appears or is assumed through recognition of the mode,

it turns not only into a harmonic anchor (Schoen, 1940, p38)

but into the final goal of the melodic movement

(Francès, 1958, Exp.IV).

Experientially it is as if the listener, carried by the melody,

were drawn towards this tonic finality long before he arrives there.”

(Kreitler, ibid, p137)

The ways of delaying resolution of the tension are many.

If the tension is caused by a tone alien to the key of the melody,

instead of returning to the tones of the key,

we might instead regard the dissonant note as a consonant note of a different key,

and modulate to that key for further melodic development.

The creature or entity is reaching towards something.

The baby elephant trying to climb onto a shelf.

A little girl trying to post a letter to Santa (Hummel).

It is incomplete, painful because the object has not yet been achieved,

accompanied with the passion and delayed muscular tension of anger or sex.

Consider the underlying structure of the Baby Elephant

reaching to step up on the shelf: the actual position,

with the back leg not yet reaching the edge, and

the mental image of the foot on the

shelf ready to push.

Turning from Rockwell, one of the most successful artists of the 20thC

to one of the most successful producers of figurines,

we see again the same major categories.

More interesting, though, is that the manufacturing constraints

of figurines require great simplification.

And this simplification must leave intact the visual clues

as to the role the character is playing,

and the feelings they are having.

The release mechanism cues

have to be distilled out,

in purer form.

The impact on us of the striving character is assured by its smallness in the face of the task at hand.

The hair caught in the wind, the height of the postbox,

the size of mum’s scrubbing brush,

all give clues.