J. Anthony Allen explains how dissonant intervals resolve to consonant ones. A major second resolves down to unison or up to a major third. A minor second typically resolves down to unison. A major seventh can ascend to an octave or descend to a sixth, though the latter requires creative voice-leading.
Okay, let's get rid of my consonant stuff here or my scale there. And let's just look at these dissonant intervals that we talked about. Now, how can we resolve these? It's a couple different ways now. Well, actually, let me rewind a step. Let's talk about what resolution means. Resolution means that we get it to its consonant state. In other words, we take this dissonant interval and we let it go to where it feels like it needs to go. Right. It's not just that we put a consonant interval after a dissonant interval. It's certain dissonances want to go certain places. So it's their natural resolution. I think we've talked a little bit about this when we talked about, like, the five chord to the one chord that has a dissonance in it. The V chord has a dissonance in it. Well, actually, you could say it doesn't. It's just a chord that wants to resolve down to the I chord. That's how some chords work. Intervals work the same way. They have places they want to go. The dissonant ones have places they want to go. Some of them have multiple places they want to go. You've got some choices. So let's start with our major second here. I'm just gonna go out here, and let's do a whole note, since our tempo is kind of fast. And let's do. Okay, so a major second. Where does that want to go? There's two ways you could resolve this. You could resolve it to a unison just like that, where essentially the D falls down. You always think about directions of notes here. So in this case, the C stays the same, and the D essentially falls down and becomes a unison. Another way we could resolve this is to a major third. So in that case, the C stays the same and the D climbs up to an E. We think about these as multiple voices. Like, each note is going to go its own path, and we're going to talk about that more when we talk about counterpoint. But imagine singing this, though. Imagine you have two people singing this. One person is going to sing this and then this. So they're going to stay the same. One is going to go D up to E, and that's going to sound like it resolves. Right? So this is not a good spot to end a piece of music on, but this is. Right, so it's a resolution. This is a resolution to this dissonance. Okay, let's look at the next one we had here, which I think was a minor second. Okay. A minor second really has only one easy place it can go, and that is down to a unison. A minor second resolving up to a third doesn't really work all that well sometimes you could make it work if you were crafty. But typically, a minor second wants to resolve down to a unison. So this note really wants to fall down to here. That's really the best place for that to go. What else do we have here? A major seventh. Let's look at where that goes. So major seventh. Could go two places. The most obvious one would be for it to go to an octave where this note stays the same and the top note climbs up to an octave to resolve it. Right. That feels like a resolution. But if we wanted to get crafty, another thing we could do. Here's our seventh again. Let's resolve it down to a sixth. Now, this sixth is not an extremely consonant interval, right? But if we did a little magic, we could make this sound more consonant. Let's hear it without some magic and just hear a seventh resolving to a sixth.
