| Just as it can be said that music requires at least 3 consecutive notes or beats to have a tempo and a rhythm, it can also be said that it requires a "cadence" which at bare minimum is two consecutive pitched notes but usually at least three. C-G-C is a simple 'harmonic' cadence. It is, for example, the basis of oom-pah music (think military marches which repeat C-G in the bass with a melody on top, and end on C when the melody is done). There is a form of musical analysis (Schenkerian) that can be used to show that nearly all music has the basic form C-G-C, which is usually expressed as I-V-I (chord I is C major and chord V is the 5th chord of C major, which is G major). It is of course nowhere near as simple as I've expressed here! So resolution is basically the cadence of the piece's harmony, much like a story has beginning, middle and end, so does harmony. The reason chord V and chord I are so powerfully related is that the 3rd note of V is the leading note of chord I and the 7th note of V is the 4th of chord I. This is actually significant to understand because it is how one can see the purest relationship between harmony and melody. In early music (eg medieval plainsong) the fundamentals of more complex harmony were first developed from melody. In the case of C major with two voices, the notes would provide resolution from notes F and B to notes E and C. The FB is a tritone, which is dissonant and wants to be resolved in the human ear. The EC is the major triad of C major, which is harmonious and consonant and resolves the dissonance of FB. |