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6.7.2 Consonance and Dissonance: Storytelling Music
Good music works like good storytelling. There’s conflict, suspense, intrigue. That’s the function of dissonant harmony. As long as there’s dissonance, you don’t feel a sense of finality or resolution. So the brain expects more musical storytelling and an eventual release from suspense.
Resolution only comes with a return to scale degree 1, the tonic note (the centre of gravity) and the simple non-dissonant major triad. This may happen periodically throughout the song, not only once at the end.
But if it happens too much and too often, the chord progression gets boring. Like leaving home but never venturing more than a few hundred metres before returning home.
The other extreme is going away for too long a time, getting lost and never finding your way back home.
So, in good musical storytelling, you want to get the right balance between consonance and dissonance. You want to make things interesting, but not so “interesting” that following the music gets so difficult and confusing that the listener zones out.