Tension, PulseI am enamored with the minor second interval.
Sufjan Stevens’ song Seven Swans has riveted my attention since the first time I heard it a few years ago. A song of praise, but a weird one; filled with strange, historic/prophetic images and a declaration of God’s irresistible pursuit of his own. I drew much comfort from it when I received some devastating news about a year and a half ago, and it still takes me immediately to a place of quiet submission in my heart. Musically, it frustrates me, simply because I can’t sing it all by myself. When the chorus arrives with “He is the Lord,” you hear first one high note, and then a voice holds it while a second voice descends a minor second, before proceeding on to the minor third below. It’s that spot in the middle, the second against the held note, that contains incredible beauty. Notes that close together aren’t supposed to sound pretty to Western ears. They clash – the sound waves fight each other, much like putting a bright pink against an orange-er bright pink.  But there’s another effect, and I once had a friend explain it as the kind of feeling when you let your eyes wander close to the sun, catching a glorious shimmer that’s just a little too painful to look at directly. 
I think part of the reason the sound is so precious to me is that it evokes the same gut reaction that comes from holding the betrayal of the broken world and the utter trustworthiness of God in the same thought. It hurts; it grates against the harmony we tend to seek; but if I can stay still and not shy away, the tension shimmers. That aural shimmer is a jagged rhythm as the ear bounces back and forth, trying to settle on one of the tones; an oscillation that is a hyper amplification of another interesting musical detail that has been delighting me in the song. The title of the song is repeated many times in the second half of the piece, overlaying the above-described chorus, and the three S’s in the enunciated phrase “Seven SwanS” hit each of the three steady beats of the measure. S, itself, is an unsettling sound – irregular, almost a whistle, air escaping through the teeth without a note from the voicebox to warm it up. Sufjan could have let the last S in “swans” slide into the beginning of the next word, but it would have undone the reassuring pulse that he sets up with those two simple words. The tempo that flows out of it is just at the rate of my normal breathing pattern. This marriage of unsettled tension and stabilizing pulse feels like life, feels like faith, feels like being small and not fully understanding but merely being instead. Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up; My eyes are not raised too high for me. I do not think on things too great or marvelous Or matters too difficult for me. But I have calmed a quieted my soul, Like a weaned child with its mother is my soul within me. (This Waterdeep version of Psalm 131, quoted above, also makes effective use of the minor second – the repeated two highest notes of the piano accompaniment, as well as in a lot of the melodic ornamentation.) | 
