Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco ("I Mourn the Dead, I Call the Living") for eight-tracktape is a musical composition created in 1980 by Jonathan Harvey, with the assistance of Stanley Haynes and Xavier Rodet,[2] commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The two sounds contrasted are the tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral, England and the voice of the composer's son Dominic, at the time a chorister there, both recorded by John Whiting. The text is taken from that written on the bell: Horas Avolantes Numero, Mortuos Plango: Vivos ad Preces Voco ("I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead: the living I call to prayer").[3]Music V was used to analyze and transform the sounds.
The music is 'octophonic', being projected into the auditorium through a cube of eight channels: "the ideal listener is 'inside' the bell, its partials distributed in space; the boy's voice flies around, derived from, yet becoming the bell sound."[4] "The eight sections are based on one of the principal eight lowest partials. Chords are constructed from the repertoire of thirty-three partials [of the bell], and modulations from one area of the spectrum to another are achieved by means of glissandi."[5]
The bell's spectrum, though on C, contains F harmonic series partials, "'to curiously thrilling and disturbing effect.'"[6] "Such 'unanalyzable' secondary strike notes are quite common in bells."[3]
The organization of the piece, "modulating 'from a bigger bell to a smaller bell,'" may, "be interpreted in a number of ways:"[6]
"as a quasi-tonal procedure" ["hierarchies analogous to (but distinct from) the traditional western tonal system."][3]
"as an attempt to transfer serial processes to electronic music"
"'as different perspectives on an object that is always present'" per Michael Clarke
According to Curtis Roads, "Three compositions produced in the 1980s stand as good examples of compositional manipulation of analysis data: Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1981)[sic] by Jonathan Harvey, Désintegrations (1983, Salabert Trajectoires) by Tristan Murail, and Digital Moonscapes (1985, CBS/Sony) by Wendy Carlos."[7]Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco is notable both within and without Harvey's career: "it showed the [IRCAM] institute's apparently esoteric research programme could yield music capable of appealing to a wider audience,"[6] and it "continues the process, established in the String Quartet, of initiating a work with the detailed investigation of a single sound—in this case the Winchester bell. The crucial difference is that whereas the open D string used as the basis of the earlier work may be heard as a harmonic series, the bell produces a spectrum of partials not harmonically related to one another or to the fundamental c."[6]
1 2 3 4 Downes, Michael (2009). Jonathan Harvey: Song offerings and White as jasmine, p.22. ISBN978-0-7546-6022-4. Quotes Harvey 1986c, p.181 and Whittall 1999, p.27.
Bossis, Bruno. 2004. "Mortuos plango, vivos voco de Jonathan Harvey ou le miroir de la spiritualité". Musurgia: Analyse et pratique musicales 11, nos. 1–2:119–44.
Clarke, Michael. 2006. "Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos plango, vivos voco". In Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music, edited by Mary Simoni, 111–43. Studies on New Music Research. New York, NY: Routledge.
Georgakī, Anastasia [Γεωργάκη, Αναστασία]. 2004. "Η μεταφυσική διάσταση της συνθετικής τραγουδιστής φωνής στο έργο Mortuos Plango-Vivos Voco (J. Harvey, 1980)". Πολυφωνία [Polifonia], no. 4: (Spring): 58–74.
Harvey, Jonathan. 1981. "Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco: A Realization at IRCAM". Computer Music Journal 5, no. 4 (Winter): 22–24.
Metzer, David Joel. 2009. Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Music in the Twentieth Century 26. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-51779-9.
Palmer, John. 2018. "Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco by Jonathan Harvey. An aural score, analysis and discussion". '008-MA, 009-MP, 0010-MP. Vision Edition. ISBN 978-0-9931761-3-5. ISMN: 979-0-9002315-4-3, 979-0-9002315-5-0.'
Additive synthesis is a sound synthesis technique that creates timbre by adding sine waves together.
Computer music is the application of computing technology in music composition, to help human composers create new music or to have computers independently create music, such as with algorithmic composition programs. It includes the theory and application of new and existing computer software technologies and basic aspects of music, such as sound synthesis, digital signal processing, sound design, sonic diffusion, acoustics, electrical engineering, and psychoacoustics. The field of computer music can trace its roots back to the origins of electronic music, and the first experiments and innovations with electronic instruments at the turn of the 20th century.
A harmonic series is the sequence of harmonics, musical tones, or pure tones whose frequency is an integer multiple of a fundamental frequency.
In physics, acoustics, and telecommunications, a harmonic is a sinusoidal wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the fundamental frequency of a periodic signal. The fundamental frequency is also called the 1st harmonic; the other harmonics are known as higher harmonics. As all harmonics are periodic at the fundamental frequency, the sum of harmonics is also periodic at that frequency. The set of harmonics forms a harmonic series.
An overtone is any resonant frequency above the fundamental frequency of a sound. In other words, overtones are all pitches higher than the lowest pitch within an individual sound; the fundamental is the lowest pitch. While the fundamental is usually heard most prominently, overtones are actually present in any pitch except a true sine wave. The relative volume or amplitude of various overtone partials is one of the key identifying features of timbre, or the individual characteristic of a sound.
Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the "rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation ; the second is learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks to define processes and general principles in music". The musicological approach to theory differs from music analysis "in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built."
In music, timbre, also known as tone color or tone quality, is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musical instruments. It also enables listeners to distinguish different instruments in the same category.
IRCAM is a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, especially in the fields of avant garde and electro-acoustical art music. It is situated next to, and is organisationally linked with, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The extension of the building was designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Much of the institute is located underground, beneath the fountain to the east of the buildings.
Campanology is the scientific and musical study of bells. It encompasses the technology of bells – how they are founded, tuned and rung – as well as the history, methods, and traditions of bellringing as an art.
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions, and directionality. In this hierarchy the single pitch or triad with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The root of the tonic triad forms the name given to the key, so in the key of C major the tone C can be both the tonic of the scale and the root of the tonic triad. The tonic can be a different tone in the same scale, when the work is said to be in one of the modes of the scale.
In music, consonance and dissonance are categorizations of simultaneous or successive sounds. Within the Western tradition, some listeners associate consonance with sweetness, pleasantness, and acceptability, and dissonance with harshness, unpleasantness, or unacceptability, although there is broad acknowledgement that this depends also on familiarity and musical expertise. The terms form a structural dichotomy in which they define each other by mutual exclusion: a consonance is what is not dissonant, and a dissonance is what is not consonant. However, a finer consideration shows that the distinction forms a gradation, from the most consonant to the most dissonant. In casual discourse, as German composer and music theorist Paul Hindemith stressed, "The two concepts have never been completely explained, and for a thousand years the definitions have varied". The term sonance has been proposed to encompass or refer indistinctly to the terms consonance and dissonance.
Spectral music uses the acoustic properties of sound – or sound spectra – as a basis for composition.
Jonathan Dean Harvey was a British composer. He held teaching positions at universities and music conservatories in Europe and the United States.
Horațiu Rădulescu was a Romanian-French composer, best known for the spectral technique of composition.
John Palmer (1959) is a British composer, pianist, musicologist, and university professor.
William A. Sethares is an American music theorist and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. In music, he has contributed to the theory of Dynamic Tonality and provided a formalization of consonance.
Orchidée is software developed by IRCAM as a computer-aided orchestration tool.
Désintégrations, for 17 musical instruments and computer generated tape (1982–83) is a musical composition of spectral music by Tristan Murail, commissioned for IRCAM, Paris. The piece is more discontinuous than Murail's earlier composition Gondwana, owing in part to the use of dramatic silences throughout and particularly in the 6th section. According to Julian Anderson,
"although the tape does not attempt to 'simulate' any particular instrument, an organic unity between it and the orchestra is established such that the two blend perfectly. The title refers to this process of voyaging inside sounds and exploring their inner life; sounds melt before us, allowing us to discover their interior."
Digital Moonscapes (1984) is an album by Wendy Carlos. "Written for orchestra, it is inspired by several astronomical subjects." A symphony orchestra is simulated using Digital Synth's GDS and Synergy Digital Synthesizers. These used additive and complex FM/PM modulation. She named her ensemble the LSI Philharmonic: "('Large Scale Integration' circuits, i.e., computer chips)". "This was the first digitally synthesized orchestra of any significance that a single composer could command."
But why do all this?...The goal ought to be providing the base on which to build new sounds with orchestral qualities that have not been heard before but are equally satisfying to the ear...look for the next steps using the experimental hybrid and imaginary sounds which have grown out of this work.
The strike tone, strike note, or tap note, of a percussion instrument when struck, is the dominant note perceived immediately by the human ear. It is also known as the prime or fundamental note. However, an analysis of the bell's frequency spectrum reveals that the fundamental only exists weakly and its dominance is a human perception of a note built up by the complex series of harmonics that are generated. The correct and accurate harmonic tuning is therefore important in creating a good strike tone.
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