The emancipation of the dissonance was a concept or goal put forth by composer Arnold Schoenberg and others, including his pupil

Anton Webern Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and stead ...

. The phrase first appears in Schoenberg's 1926 essay "Opinion or Insight?" . It may be described as a

metanarrative A metanarrative (also meta-narrative and grand narrative; french: métarécit) is a narrative ''about'' narratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet ...

to justify atonality. Jim describes: Composers such as Charles Ives,

Dane Rudhyar Dane Rudhyar (March 23, 1895 – September 13, 1985), born Daniel Chennevière, was a American author, modernist composer and humanistic astrologer. He was a pioneer of modern transpersonal astrology. Biography Dane Rudhyar was born in Paris on ...

, Duke Ellington, and

Lou Harrison Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer, music critic, music theorist, painter, and creator of unique musical instruments. Harrison initially wrote in a dissonant, ultramodernist style similar to his for ...

connected the emancipation of the dissonance with the emancipation of society and humanity. Michael Broyles calls Ives tone-cluster-rich song "Majority" as "an incantation, a mystical statement of belief in the masses or the people" . Duke Ellington, after playing some of his pieces for a journalist, said, "That's the Negro's life ... Hear that chord! Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part" . Lou Harrison described

Carl Ruggles Carl Ruggles (born Charles Sprague Ruggles; March 11, 1876 – October 24, 1971) was an American composer, painter and teacher. His pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger ...

's counterpoint as "a community of singing lines, living a life of its own, . . . careful not to get ahead or behind in its rhythmic cooperation with the others" . Rudhyar gave the subtitle "A New Principle of Musical and Social Organization" to his book ''Dissonant Harmony'', writing, "Dissonant music is thus the music of true and spiritual Democracy; the music of universal brotherhoods; music of Free Souls, not of personalities. It abolishes tonalities, exactly as the real Buddhistic Reformation abolished castes into the Brotherhood of Monks; for Buddhism is nothing but spiritual Democracy" . Just as the harmonic series was and is used as a justification for consonance, such as by Rameau, among others, the harmonic series is often used as physical or psychoacoustic justification for the gradual emancipation of

intervals Interval may refer to: Mathematics and physics * Interval (mathematics), a range of numbers ** Partially ordered set#Intervals, its generalization from numbers to arbitrary partially ordered sets * A statistical level of measurement * Interval e ...

and

chords Chord may refer to: * Chord (music), an aggregate of musical pitches sounded simultaneously ** Guitar chord a chord played on a guitar, which has a particular tuning * Chord (geometry), a line segment joining two points on a curve * Chord ( ...

found further and further up the harmonic series over time, such as is argued by Henry Cowell in defense of his tone clusters. Some argue further that they are not dissonances, but consonances higher up the harmonic series and thus more complex. ; cited in gives the following diagram, a specific timeline he proposes: Chailley harmonic series emancipationt

A 1996 book by Thomas J. Harrison, ''1910, the Emancipation of Dissonance'', uses Schoenberg's "revolution" to trace other movements in the arts around that time.

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