contemplating timbre
29/10/12 07:43
My venture into contemplation and music began with a fascination with timbre. I long said, and still say, that sound itself is the most expressive musical medium. Such a statement is fairly obvious, for without sound there is no music. But what I mean is that the quality of sound, timbre, is that expressive foundation. Harmony is clearly a subset of sound, a series of pitches is a subset of sound. And I was at one time very excited just to hear Schoenberg’s statements at the end of his Harmonielehre where he envisioned a day when melodies would be made of tone color, etc. My excitement for the statement has diminished over the years, as I realize more fully that he intended that timbre be subjected to the same kind of hierarchical thinking that pitch was over the centuries, a concentration of thinking and composing that produced the wonders of functional harmony. I now realize that as timbre comes to be fully utilized and understood, our awareness of it will dawn in a day in which hierarchy is not held in the same light as in the past. In fact, our age seems to search for the expressive use of chaos, and timbre fits into that realm much more comfortably than into a hierarchical structure. Our age questions hierarchy, and the music that grows up in the age of global awareness will grow into the next available higher-level category to be filled -- timbre, of course -- making sense of it, organizing it in a way that matches the spirit of our age.