Файл:Debussy's chords for Guiraud.pngChords, featuring chromatically altered sevenths and ninths and progressing unconventionally, explored by Debussy in a "celebrated conversation at the piano with his teacher Ernest Guiraud" (Lockspeiser 1962, 207).
The emancipation of the dissonance was a concept or goal put forth by composer Arnold Schoenberg and others, including his pupil Anton Webern, who styled it The Path to the New Music. The phrase first appears in Schoenberg's 1926 essay "Opinion or Insight?".Шаблон:Sfn It may be described as a metanarrative to justify atonality. The musicologist Jim Samson describes:
Composers such as Charles Ives, Dane Rudhyar, Duke Ellington, and Lou Harrison connected the emancipation of the dissonance with the emancipation of society and humanity. Michael Broyles calls Ives' tone-cluster-rich song "Majority" as "an incantation, a mystical statement of belief in the masses or the people".Шаблон:Sfn Duke Ellington, after playing some of his pieces for a journalist, said, "That's the Negro's life ... Hear that chord! Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part".Шаблон:Sfn Lou Harrison described Carl Ruggles's counterpoint as "a community of singing lines, living a life of its own, . . . careful not to get ahead or behind in its rhythmic cooperation with the others".Шаблон:Sfn Rudhyar gave the subtitle "A New Principle of Musical and Social Organization" to his book Dissonant Harmony, writing, "Dissonant music is thus the music of true and spiritual Democracy; the music of universal brotherhoods; music of Free Souls, not of personalities. It abolishes tonalities, exactly as the real Buddhistic Reformation abolished castes into the Brotherhood of Monks; for Buddhism is nothing but spiritual Democracy".Шаблон:Sfn
A 1996 book by Thomas J. Harrison, 1910, the Emancipation of Dissonance, uses Schoenberg's "revolution" to trace other movements in the arts around that time.
