Musical discord in a Midsummer Night's Dream

[elodie]

Hi everybody , I would like to know what is meant by "musical discord" ?
I have a topic on a Midsummer Night's Dream and it is about the musical discord in this play. I don't know really what the teacher means by musical discord ...Help !!!

[Volumnia]

This is way late probably to be of any help, but I just discovered this forum today.

I'm not sure what your teacher had in mind, but generally speaking in music there is a distinction between dissonance and discord. Dissonance is something like an unresolved dominant seventh, and discord is like when a cat walks on the piano keys--especially if the piano isn't well tuned.

In Shakespeare's language there is much use of such concepts as "proportion" and "degree" as in Troilus and Cressida: "Untune that string, take but degree away, and hark! what discord follows." Take a guitar: if you tune the G string down to G flat and then try to form the chords as usual, ooh, what discord follows!

Presumably in MND you are referring to the mechanicals. I saw a performance last spring where Bottom et al deliberately went out of their way to sing out of tune and incorrectly, with hilarious results. In contrast the fairies attending Titania sing beautifully, with "concord of sweet sounds" to quote a passage in Richard II.

The whole universe was thought to be tuned in harmonious proportions. If you stop a guitar string square in the middle, it will sound an octave higher than the open string; 1/4 of the way, it will sound a 5th. The planets were supposed to have similar relationships, and hence the music of the spheres. THe various classes and ranks of society worked harmoniously if they maintained their "degree." There is a 17th century poem called "Orchestra" by I think his names is John Davies (John somebody at any rate) that explains this fully. It is openly celebrated in the masque. It is noteworthy to me that WS did not write any masques as such, though there are masque-like scenes in As You Like It, MND and in a way most all of the comedies.

All these ideas are implicit in MND and most of the other plays, since they were staples of thought at the time. Dramatic tension, whether comic or tragic, enters when this order is upset or threatened.

Does this help?