In Praise of Dissonance:

Reflections on Stability, Harmony, and Tradition

BENEDICT AND TALIA SHEEHAN

On November 7, 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge failed spectacularly. That morning, only four months after it had opened, the structure started shaking in the hard wind.  Drivers felt their cars sliding around and heard the structure cracking; they barely had enough time to clamber out and sprint to safety. Within minutes, the bridge had collapsed into the Puget Sound. 

On the morning of June 10, 2000, the London Millennium Footbridge was opened to the public, and just a few hours later, it started doing the same thing. The builders were forced to close the bridge that same day, and it needed two years’ worth of redesigning and rebuilding before it was safe for regular traffic. 

What was going on in both cases was a phenomenon known to physicists and engineers as harmonic resonance. Small vibrations within the structures, caused by wind or by ordinary traffic, effectively started echoing themselves—quite literally harmonizing with themselves—doubling in amplitude with each vibration and creating an exponentially increasing wave of resonance that the materials and construction techniques of the bridges were eventually unable to withstand. Essentially, the two bridges fell victim to their own internal alignment.

Engineers need to account for harmonic resonance in their structural designs. And the way they account for it is somewhat counter-intuitive. They prevent harmonic resonance by strategically introducing interference—essentially, by creating dissonance within the structure—so that small vibrations don’t infinitely echo themselves. For the two of us, as lifelong musicians, there is a fascinating parallel with what we’ve experienced in our own work. 

In music, and especially in vocal technique, harmonic resonance is generally regarded as a good thing. It naturally amplifies sound while at the same time decreasing the amount of energy needed to produce that sound. However, in suspension bridges—or in microphone feedback, or in tsunamis, or earthquakes—harmonic resonance turns out to be a bad thing, sometimes catastrophically bad. In any dynamic structure that that is constantly subjected to subtle changes in its environment—whether it’s a bridge, a building, an ocean, or a network of continental plates—interference is crucial. Dissonance saves the day. Without it, the structure will vibrate with those environmental changes and will amplify its reaction to those vibrations until it shakes itself to pieces. 

So yes, harmony is good, but exclusively harmony turns out to be destructive. Every experienced musician instinctively understands this. Music without dissonance isn’t actually stable, either in its internal structure or in terms of its ability to connect with people and maintain a devoted audience for itself. In musical terms, dissonance may be broadly defined as a set of one or more pitches in which either the fundamental tones or their accompanying overtones interfere with one another in some way. Consonances—or tones that “harmonize” with one another (in popular terminology)—are, by contrast, sets of one or more pitches that align with one another and thereby create harmonic resonance. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, the traditional consonances, such as unisons, octaves, and perfect fifths, actually do create more resonance than intervals that are considered dissonant.) 

In any given piece of music, it is the interplay between consonance and dissonance, the dance between tension and resolution, that creates movement and gives music its sense of direction and meaning. Without dissonance, music simply doesn’t move—and, by extension, doesn’t really move its listeners. Though exclusively consonant music may appear, at least in theory, to have a kind of monolithic stability on the small scale, it risks its stability on the large scale by coming across as rather obtuse and meaningless, and thus becoming music that no one cares to listen to or remember in the long term. Musical stability, therefore, is a product of tension, a product of oscillation between the static and the dynamic, between the harmonious and the dissonant.

Even in the material world, stability is not fixed and unmoving. In our universe, it is achieved not by restricting movement but by allowing for it. Movement is actually the fundamental characteristic of existence. All molecules move or vibrate at the atomic and subatomic levels. All organisms maintain homeostasis by moving through intake-output and rest-effort cycles. All stable planetary orbital positions are actually examples of objects in constant, dizzying, high-speed motion. Like a bird balancing on a wire, stability is actually attained through continuous small-scale movement. Yes, excessive movement is destabilizing. But too little movement is actually just as destabilizing.

Human communities and institutions, especially religious ones, operate in much the same way. When there’s too much ideological alignment within an institution or community, too much inherent consensus, too much similarity of perspective, ideas and behaviors have a tendency to amplify themselves in a cycle that looks a lot like harmonic resonance. Without a little calculated interference, a little strategic dissonance, that cycle can quickly spiral out of control. It’s no accident that so many cults end up self-destructing in a blazing inferno or in a shoot-out with the FBI, or that so many governments that attempt to realize a vision of perfect alignment within the body politic end up committing atrocities. The best safeguard against catastrophic harmonic resonance within human society is for there to be deliberate and routine interaction with ideas, perspectives, and experiences that differ from one’s own. Essentially, human society needs dissonance in order to maintain stability.

Within Orthodoxy, as well as in many Catholic circles, we see today a deep commitment to the idea of tradition. An enormous amount of the rhetoric surrounding Orthodoxy, and especially modern conversion to Orthodoxy, involves words like ancient, original, historic, pure, apostolic, or unaltered, and our concept of tradition tends to be heavily colored by such associations. Many Orthodox believers today seem to have constructed an image of tradition as, essentially, a perfect harmony without dissonance. Thus, when they encounter dissonance of some kind within the church—whether in the form of opposing perspectives, beliefs, or modes of behavior, or simply in the form of doubt, questioning, or criticism—they tend to assume that the dissonance needs to be eliminated, that the opposition must be silenced, and that alignment needs to be reasserted at all costs, lest the harmony of the tradition be damaged. However, anyone who has undertaken even a cursory study of church history will probably suspect that such a picture of a changeless, unbroken harmony doesn’t quite match up with the facts on the ground. With a little more serious study, one begins to suspect that any notion of perfect harmony whatsoever is difficult to maintain without some serious editing of the historical record. 

What if conflict isn’t necessarily a problem? What if, instead of thinking of tradition as unadulterated harmony and consonance, we thought of it rather as something in a state of constant motion—continuously oscillating  between stasis and dynamism, between maintenance and innovation, between harmony and dissonance? And what if, instead of regarding dissonance within tradition as a threat to stability, we saw it as an essential saving grace, guarding the tradition against the danger of catastrophic harmonic resonance?

In our work as musicians, as well as in our life experience more generally, we have found that if we care about something and want it to be stable and continuous over the long term, we need both to support it and challenge it. We have found again and again that we’re only able to create stability by allowing interference, and even by sometimes deliberately introducing dissonance in order to mix things up a little bit. Yes, we are aiming for harmony and alignment most of the time. But if we allow ourselves to fall into moving only in a predictable, consonant, regular way, we find again and again that our movement tends to amplify itself and cause destructive resonance. 

If we want bridges to safely carry us over long expanses of empty space, they need to have dissonance built into their structures. If we want music to retain our attention and interest, to move us and inspire us, we need to value dissonance as much as harmony. We need to not let ourselves fall into the trap of thinking that only harmony creates stability. Likewise, if we want our traditions to be maintained, to continue over the long term, to offer us a home, to connect us to God and to one another, those traditions need to allow for, and even welcome, dissonance.