[akdor1154]

I don't even understand the article's claim to dissonance - is it the dissonance you'd hear from e.g playing on B on a just intonation C piano? Or is it a 'dissonance' in the sense of a modulation to a non-diatonic key? Or is it just some expectation that the audience associates moods with different keys? (So assuming the audience can be expected to have at least subconscious absolute pitch, seems unlikely)

[TheOtherHobbes]

None of the above. It's dissonance as a language - traditional expectations of how the harmony develops being stretched, subverted, warped, and so on. For emotional effect.

There isn't really a modern equivalent, which is more or less the point. Not even jazz, which is distantly related.

But you can get a remote sense from something like Damien Hirst's Verity Statue, which starts from some familiar expectations of public sculpture and subverts and undermines them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jrvX2ZrDvk

The difference is Hirst evokes horror and a Capitalist Gothic aesthetic.

Schubert is superficially more reassuring now. But at the time he was influenced by what used to be called the Sublime - which doesn't just mean excellent as it does today, but used to mean a complex state of emotion and experience that was so intense and rich it was overwhelming.

That's what's buried in Schubert's use of harmony and dissonance.