New music by way of the composer, composition, and performance challenges the listener to maintain his sense of self while being involved in a nonlinear multi-dimensional event. There is no escape from its action. It does not exist as one of a series of discrete steps, but as a transmission in all directions from the field's center. We learn to let ourselves fit with and resonate with the sounds. Dissonance means not fitting.
Dissonance is an inability to be flexible.
It is the root of all disease. The physicist David Bohm speaks of health as the essence of nonobstructed, indivisible, flowing movement of the self's internal harmony transcribed into the external world. In tonal music the appreciator sought the fundamental in the music as a metaphor of spiritual unity, the ending of a journey. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.