J. Anthony Allen shows how to resolve dissonant intervals like major sevenths, minor sevenths, and tritones by changing bass notes, adding chords, or moving up or down. A lower A can shift C major into A minor; a minor seventh resolves through a sixth to a fifth; a tritone lands on a perfect fifth or fourth.
He 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 six. Right. It sounds pretty good that way, but if I reinforce. This is getting kind of a little bit more advanced. But what I could do is reinforce this chord. Let me throw an A on the bottom also. So what this is going to now feel like is not like this note is the root, the C is the root. It's going to feel like it's an A minor chord, in which case it will be more pleasurable. So just by emphasizing that A at the bottom, I made it feel like an A minor chord and not a C major chord. So more on that when we talk about counterpoint. Let's look at a minor seventh. A minor seventh could do kind of the same two things. It can go up to an octave or down to a sixth. I'd probably lean towards going down to a sixth, which means try to resolve this to a sixth without doing this trick here. And one way we can do it is we can add another chord. So check this out. Let's hear it without a third chord. So minor seventh resolving to a sixth. Okay. Now this isn't completely resolved. To me, it's not bad. It's not a really sharp distance. But what if I added a third chord and went down to a fifth? Now the seventh, the minor seventh resolves to a sixth, which resolves to a fifth. Right. So the resolution here takes two chords to get there. It's kind of an oddity of the minor seventh. It's a non diatonic interval, so it's a little trickier sometimes. Okay. And then our tritone. Our tritone is another non diatonic interval. So it can be a little tricky. But let's look at what we can do. This one can really go either direction by half step. And it'll be okay if we go up to a perfect fifth. This is a natural. That's what I meant to do. Okay, that works. We can also take it down to a fourth if we wanted. And in this case, because that fourth is kind of that special case, it's not totally resolved to me, you might add another chord and go down to a third. Right. And this has kind of a conclusion feel to it. So there's a lot of different ways we can resolve dissonant intervals. But the thing to remember is what makes a dissonant interval is a need to resolve. It sounds like it wants to resolve, but which means it wants to go somewhere else to a consonant interval. And there are a number of different ways we can get there. Now for now, what I've walked you through here is kind of a free form. We can go here, we can go there. If we get into the strict rules, the really strict rules of this, then those rules kind of dictate what exactly can go where. Depending on the context, all the music around it is going to say this note has to go to that note, this note has to go to that note. And there are a lot of rules about that with intervals and that is called counterpoint. And that's what we're going to talk about next. It's a bunch of rules that say this note has to go there, this note has to go there and all this other stuff. So that's going to be the next big section of this class. So hang on for that I want to do a couple more things first and then we'll get to that.
