Ever been excited for somebody to arrive at your home?
A relative, a close friend, a dinner date, a spouse returning from a business trip? Dinner’s on the stove, music’s on the stereo; everything’s arranged, and the clock reads three minutes until the arrival time that you agreed upon. Don’t you love that anticipation?
Don’t you almost wish your guest would be ten minutes late just so you can relish that tension a little longer? You almost don’t want release, right? You’re not quite ready to pull the ribbon from the box. It’s fun imagining. It’s fun waiting. It’s fun smelling the delicious food, letting it make you hungry.
It’s true in most human amusements: postponing pleasure heightens pleasure.
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A skilled composer knows how to fascinate an audience, holding them rapt with anticipation. Melodies and harmonies can create electric patterns of tension and release akin to waiting for—and receiving—that guest mentioned above. Sometimes these tensions are subtle; no more than a tingle. Other times they’re powerful, dramatic, bewildering.
Sometimes tension resolves in a way that we listeners expected; this can be gratifying. You expected your guest, and sure enough their headlights are sliding up the driveway through the dark. Satisfying.
But sometimes tension resolves in ways that we didn’t expect, which can be even more exciting and lead to new forms of expectation. Extending the metaphor I began earlier: a sleek, delectably red, unfamiliar car is moving up the driveway. Who’s that? Is it the guest you were expecting?
In a way, yes. The car stops and parks, the door opens, and your expected guest steps out—but it’s been almost a year since you last saw them, and they look great. They’ve been working out. And—what’s that? They’re holding a wrapped box and smiling to themselves as they come up the walk.
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We love anticipation when we know there’s a reward involved (and sometimes when there isn’t). Have you ever thought about why we wrap gifts at all? Why we put cards in envelopes even when we’re going to hand-deliver them? Why we hide Easter eggs? We’re postponing pleasure for ourselves and others.
A simple example of musical anticipation: any dissonant chord.
Dissonance can keep us listening because we want—even need—to hear it resolve. A good pre-chorus is like the gift wrap on your chorus, setting up that latter section for its greatest possible impact.
A skilled lyricist knows how to create anticipation with rhymes alone. Different rhyme schemes can create different patterns of tension and release just as effective and complex as a chord progression.
To my mind, tension in music is anything that creates anticipation in the listener. Each line of lyric, every chord progression, every melody is an opportunity to surprise, thrill, and delight.
There are myriad ways to do that. We’ll explore several of them in depth this week, so I hope you’ll stay tuned.