Tension & Relaxation in Music
If you will think of most any piece of music, I think you will find that it is based on the twin factors of tension and relaxation.
For example, if you play nothing but a major chord over and over, there is no tension at all. If a famous pianist just played the same chord over and over again at the same rate and the same volume, people whould soon get bored and leave, no matter how great the reputation of the pianist.
But why? What’s wrong with a major chord? It seems to be a perfectly legitimate chord to play.
The answer is, of course, that no tension has been created by his performance. It is all relaxation. And for music to interest us, there has to be some kind of a balance between tension and relaxation.
What if our pianist played a song that never repeated a single chord twice — and was just a conglomeration of dissonant sounds that went nowhere in no cohesive order? We might be interested for a while, but the tension would finally drive us to get up and leave — because there was no relaxtion at all in the piece.
To be enjoyable, any piece of music has to hit some happy medium between tension and relaxation. Next time you hear a song, think about that, and I know you’ll find it true.