Metrical dissonance as a convergence element between the classical and the popular

Abstract

The music of the 20th and 21st centuries presents a great set of specificities among which is the tension between the classical/art and popular fields. These two concepts that have been revised in the context of the emergence of a cultural industry, of the reinvention of the classical orchestra, of the called contemporary "serious" music being isolated in university, and of the popular field covering a growing number of manifestations, many of which are antagonistic in some respects. Metrical dissonance is an element strongly present in the romantic sonority of nineteenth-century concert music, and it was systematized as a concept from the writings of Hector Berlioz, with a broad contribution of recent music theory. It is one of the many elements that persistently remain in the most different musical manifestations of the 20th and 21st centuries. This paper aims to indicate the existence of metrical dissonances in multiple repertories commonly identified in distinct contexts from the broad and diffuse fields of the classical/art and the popular. Definitions and categories of cultures are reviewed; frontier spaces between each category are identified. Finally, after relating several examples of the most distinct contexts, one concludes that the separation of the classical/art and the popular becomes inoperative, and that metrical dissonance can be understood as an element of convergence between the both.