Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.2
S. Klotz
The philosopher-psychologist Carl Stumpf studied Klangfarbe (timbre) as an integral part of his phenomenology. He combined novel experimental and observation techniques of timbre perception on both vowels and the sound of musical instruments with conceptual and logical work at the interface of physiology, psychology, and philosophy, outlining timbre as a complex impression (Komplexeindruck). This article argues that this approach is informed by an explicitly modern scientific framework that replaced Helmholtz’s earlier spectral model with concepts of distribution and multi-dimensionality, and with spatialization, embodied in formants (main and secondary). This refinement of the conception of timbre yielded insights into the structural laws of phenomena and into mental functions.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190637224.013.6
J. Auner
Schoenberg expended enormous energies on rethinking what sound could be and what it could mean in ways that anticipate and can be illuminated by sound studies. Focusing on Schoenberg’s understanding of the word Klang, this chapter explores the creative process and reception of Pierrot lunaire in the context of his writings on “sound,” one of the many possible translations of the term. Approaching Schoenberg’s music and his writings in Style and Idea and elsewhere from the vantage point of sound studies can attune us to his interests in destabilizing the boundaries not only between timbre, melody, and harmony, but also between music, sound, and noise, and between sound and our lived experience. The wide-ranging ramifications of his conception of Klang are evident in the ways that he engages with many aspects of music and its technologies and media while also going beyond specifically musical contexts to understand sound as a fundamental dimension of our thought and creativity, our experience, and our ways of relating with each other and our world.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190637224.013.11
R. Hasegawa
While timbre is typically understood as a property of a single musical note or event, many contemporary musical practices depend on the combination of multiple events—each with their own pitch, dynamic, and sound color—into unified composites with their own emergent timbres. Such composites are essential for composers of spectral music such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, but also can be heard in works by composers from Arnold Schoenberg to James Tenney. Viewed from the perspective of music psychology, these composites are “chimeric” percepts, thwarting the usual parsing of sonic input into separate sources through auditory scene analysis. When timbre is redefined to include composite events, it overlaps significantly with the discipline of harmony; many musical effects—textural sound-masses, synthesized acoustic spectra, virtual ring modulation, etc.—blur the lines between timbre and harmony, opening up a hybrid space between the two domains.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190637224.013.19
M. Tenzer
Musical instrument design and aesthetic desiderata for a shimmering bronze sound determine the tuning, timbre, and range of orchestral possibilities in the Balinese gamelan gong kebyar. This chapter considers the gamelan, paradoxically, as both a timbrally unified “single” instrument modularly constructed for performance by two dozen players, and as a collection of separate instruments with varied musical roles. The gamelan is timbrally unified because the sound spectrum of the full ensemble is an amplification of individual instruments’ spectra, and simultaneously it is timbrally diverse due to differing instrument ranges, mallet hardnesses, and varying thickness or shape of bronze keys and gongs. Starting from a general description of the instruments, the chapter explains the design features and musical practices step-by-step, pairing this with transcriptions and pedagogical recordings making the polyphony comprehensible and audible.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190637224.013.13
A. Hui
This chapter explores the use of timbre in scientific studies of animal vocalizations in the decades around the end of the twentieth century. In the first case, I examine the efforts of naturalists and ornithologists to represent timbre in their notation of bird song in the field. The second case study discusses current work in cognitive science to better understand the origins of human language and music through the study of songbirds. I argue that by assuming—implicitly, then explicitly—timbral perception in non-human species, the naturalists and scientists in both episodes are attempting to make timbre natural. These efforts to naturalize and universalize the perceptual importance of timbre as biologically meaningful says more about our ongoing inability to define timbre in some form other than by what it is not. Here too, timbre is not what birds hear, or at least not what they necessarily care about.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.1
Peter McMurray
This article examines the history of timbre in Qur’anic recitation, focusing on the intersection of the interior, conceptual, rule-based space of the mouth and the exterior, physical, highly variable architecture of mosques. In both cases, timbre plays a critical role in making Qur’anic recitation recognizable, even to untrained ears, and even if—especially in the case of mosques—that predominant, stereotyped setting is not necessarily representative of the tradition more broadly. The article examines the tension between Qur’an as fixed text and as recitation (qur’ān) and the challenges of reconciling these two notions of Qur’an into a definitive, unitary whole, that proved elusive in the early centuries of Islam, precisely on grounds of timbral, phonetic, and dialectal questions. At the same time, the elaborate design of rules for proper recitation has been so fully developed over the last millennium that it has become a kind of cultural technique, a rule-based algorithm that imposes on human performers a set of media-like operations. Indeed, recent computer science and engineering have fully embraced the algorithmicizing of vocality and timbre in recitation to the point of creating a number of software platforms designed to reproduce or assess the proper application of these rules. In all these different trajectories—mouth, mosque, and media—the alphabetics of the Qur’an play a central role in transducing a sacred text into the contingencies of the material world.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190637224.013.18
Arman Schwartz
“I Pini del Gianicolo,” the third movement of Ottorino Respighi’s Pini di Roma (1924), is the first symphonic composition to feature a phonograph record alongside more conventional orchestral instruments, a peculiar innovation debated by both early listeners and more recent scholars. This chapter seeks to capture Respighi’s use of a pre-recorded nightingale within a wide interpretive net, considering the status of orchestration and signification in early twentieth-century instrumental and dramatic music; the medial history of Respighi’s nightingale; as well as other attempts to combine the animal, mechanical, and musical in the months around the work’s premiere. Birdsong—real, represented, and recorded—might prompt further reflection on the peculiar materiality of timbre, whose mysteries, this chapter suggests, could also be considered the subject of Respighi’s work.
“I Pini del Gianicolo”是奥托里诺·雷斯皮吉(Ottorino Respighi)的《罗马人》(Pini di Roma)(1924)的第三乐章，是第一部以留声机唱片和更传统的管弦乐乐器为特色的交响乐作品，这是一种独特的创新，早期听众和最近的学者都在争论。考虑到二十世纪早期器乐和戏剧音乐中管弦乐的地位和意义，本章试图在广泛的解释网络中捕捉Respighi对预录夜莺的使用;Respighi夜莺的医学史;在这部作品首演的几个月里，他还尝试将动物、机械和音乐结合起来。鸟歌——真实的、被呈现的、被记录的——可能会促使人们进一步思考音色的特殊物质性，这一章暗示，音色的奥秘也可以被认为是Respighi作品的主题。
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Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.16
Deirdre Loughridge
Organ stops, violin mutes, piano pedals: these are devices for altering an instrument’s sound, and one way to understand how these devices transform sound is that they change the timbre. Already in use and objects of discussion in the seventeenth century, organ stops and violin mutes, however, pre-date the idea of timbre modification, originating in what Emily Dolan has called a “time before timbre.” These devices thus provide a way into the history of timbre before timbre—that is, into ways of conceiving and discussing tone qualities before “timbre” existed as a discrete concept. This essay examines the history of organ stops, violin mutes, and piano pedals so as to illuminate how (what we would consider) timbral dimensions of sound interacted with pitch, loudness, instruments, and musical meaning in the “time before timbre,” as well as the historical processes through which timbre came to be perceived and handled as a distinct musical parameter. It demonstrates that absence of a timbre concept did not mean inattention to instrumental sonority. Rather, before musicians developed timbral perception, it was more common to engage mimetic perception, drawing comparisons to familiar instruments to make sense of variations in sound quality. Tone-modifying devices are central to timbre’s history because they work to hold many aspects of the performer-musical instrument encounter constant, thereby isolating for comparison those qualities that go into distinctions like that between dull and bright sound.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-08DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.32
Bettina Varwig
This chapter explores early modern conceptions of voice and vocal timbre, focusing on French and German philosophical and musical writings of the long seventeenth century. It argues that a Cartesian paradigm of representation, which has tended to underpin most present-day interpretations of the music of this period, falls short of recognizing the capacity of the early modern (musical) voice to bridge the realms of the material and immaterial, of body and soul. Such a historically situated consideration of timbre – configured here as a quality arising at the intersection of the physiological and spiritual processes that constituted the human voice – thereby offers a way towards recuperating certain off-Cartesian modes of thinking, feeling and listening.
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.34
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
Adorno’s purpose in these lectures, presented at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in the fall of 1966, was to address the relationship between what he called “sound” and “structure.” At the heart of his thinking is the notion of “structural instrumentation”—the ideal of organizing timbre in a manner commensurate to the compositional logic (Satz) of a given work. Following a historical survey of orchestration and instrumentation in the music of Bach, Viennese Classicism, and the New German School, Adorno turns at length to the “new music,” and above all the work of the Second Viennese School. Ending with a brief consideration of the experiments in Klangkomposition undertaken by composers such as Stockhausen and Ligeti, Adorno challenges the younger generation of composers who held court at Darmstadt by calling into question the equality of timbre with other musical parameters.
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