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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (noun)
[KON-sah-nahns] 
1. harmony or agreement; accord; congruity: "Kevin was willing to tolerate the imperfections of his job because of the consonance between the company's mission and his moral priorities."
2. the repetition of consonants or groups of consonants, especially at the ends of words (for example, between 'stroke' and 'luck,' and 'strong' and 'ring')
3. (as in music) a combination of notes that sounds pleasing or requires no resolution, as a note with its third, fifth, or eighth
Origin:
Approximately 1420; from Old French, 'consonance'; borrowed from Latin, 'consonantia': harmony, agreement, from 'consonantem' (nominative 'consonans') present participle of 'consonare': to agree, to sound together ('con-': together + 'sonare': to sound, from 'sonus': sound). In action:
"'Affliction' wouldn't work if we couldn't see a poisonous consonance between Wade and his father, and casting Coburn as Glen Whitehouse ensures that we do. A marvelous actor who has rarely gotten the roles he needs to prove it, Coburn sinks his teeth into this part, biting down to the bone. It takes a complete absence of vanity for a star who has aged as magnificently as Coburn has to appear as deeply unattractive as he does here. In the flashback scenes he's all flinty angles, and that famous oversized jaw is a weapon he uses to lash out in merciless mockery of his wife and sons. In the later scenes, Glen's bile has to make its way past his decay, and Coburn -- padded, making heavy lumbering movements and letting his facial muscles sag -- is like a dying dog that occasionally rouses itself to bite. Watching the insincere sloppiness of his grief over his dead wife give way to his familiar nastiness is like seeing a wizened death's head emerge from a mass of flab. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone play a mean drunk in quite the way Coburn does. There's something fussy, almost prissy in the way he lifts the booze to his lips, as if he expects no pleasure from it. All that's been burned out of him. The only thing left is spiteful compulsion."
Charles Taylor. "History repeats itself," [Movie Review: Affliction] Salon.com (January 8, 1999).
"George Rochberg felt that necessity and produced serialist work still held to be as good as it gets. But when, in 1964, his son died at age 20 from a brain tumor, the composer suddenly found that this musical language, in Linton's phrase, 'could not bear the weight of his sorrow.' Though Rochberg turned against 12-tone serialism as a narcissistic dead end and began writing tonal music again, he did not abandon atonality. Instead, he put the two together in a dramatic reinterpretation of musical form. Pervasive atonal dissonance, he concluded, had made music dramatically static and emotionally impotent. It was the interplay of dissonance and consonance that gave Western music its dramatic forward impetus. This insight moved him toward melding tonality and atonality into a contemporary language that could both 'bear the weight of his sorrow' and enable him, without falsifying it, to transfigure that sorrow into authentic joy."
Marcel Smith. "Thinking Ahead: Blair ensemble explores work of modern composers," [Music Review: Blair String Quartet, Turner Recital Hall, Blair School of Music] The Nashville Scene (November 2, 2000).
"There is an untroubled harmony in everything, a full consonance in nature; only in our illusory freedom do we feel at variance with it."
Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873). Russian poet. "There is melody in the waves of the sea," The Last Love (1865).
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