Klangfarbenmelodie (German for "sound-color melody") is a musical concept that treats timbre as a melodic element. Arnold Schoenberg originated the idea. It has become synonymous with the technique of fragmenting a melodic line between different timbres.
Late in the 19th century, a sophisticated treatment of musical timbre started to emerge in works like Claude Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune . [1] During the same period, Hermann von Helmholtz theorized that timbre is part of what enables a listener to perceive melody. [2]
In 1911, Arnold Schoenberg analyzed musical sound ( klang ) as consisting of pitch (höhe), timbre (farbe), and volume (stärke). He noted that pitch was the only element that had undergone close examination, but he viewed it as subordinate to timbre, "...tone becomes perceptible by virtue of tone color, of which one dimension is pitch". He looked forward to a more sophisticated appreciation of tone color. Schoenberg also described a "futuristic fantasy" of tone color "progressions whose relations with another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches". He rhapsodized:
Tone-color melodies! How acute the senses that would be able to perceive them! How high the development of spirit that could find pleasure in such subtle things! [3] : 421–2
In its original sense, Schoenberg envisioned klangfarbenmelodie as a sequence of tone colors. There could be just one pitch, but the changing timbres are what create the semblance of melody. [4] Because Schoenberg never clearly defined the term, it was widely misunderstood. [5] There remains no clear definition of the term. [6] : 142
In 1951, Schoenberg felt compelled to revisit the concept in two short writings. One was an essay about Anton Webern's use of klangfarbenmelodie. He balked at Webern's use of traditional form schemes while using the technique. Just as melody and counterpoint gave birth to unique forms, Schoenberg believed that klangfarbenmelodie would require new forms that suited their nature. [7]
Schoenberg also dispatched duplicate letters to Luigi Dallapiccola and Josef Rufer on January 19, 1951. He asked them to only reveal the missives if his invention of klangfarbenmelodie were ever doubted. The letter also expands on the concept by explaining the "klänge" in question could be entire passages of music that would be modulated by tone color. He specifically pointed to three examples from his catalogue: "the tomb scene of Pelleas und Melisande , or much of the introduction to the fourth movement of my second String Quartet, or the fugue figure from the second Piano Piece...They are never merely individual tones of different instruments at different times, but rather combinations of moving voices." [8]
Schoenberg explored klangfarbenmelodie in Five Orchestral Pieces op. 16 (1909). The third piece in the suite is titled "Farben". [9] It features a standing chord that is translated into a klangfarbenmelodie through the restless orchestration. [10] Alban Berg used this technique in the first of his Altenberg Lieder . [11]
This original sense of klangfarbenmelodie has its most direct descendants in the practitioners of spectral music, which prizes timbre as a structural element. [12]
The more familiar meaning of klangfarbenmelodie is when a melodic line is fragmented between different timbres. [13] There are many historical precedents to the concept. In practice, composers are writing in hocket when they deploy klangfarbenmelodie. [14] The technique can also be found in polyphonic precedents like Annibale Padovano's treatment of the cantus firmus in his music. [15]
Anton Webern used this pointillistic technique extensively. A classic example is the opening melodic statement of his Fünf Stücke für Orchester Op. 10 (1913) which requires the efforts of the flute, trumpet, celeste, harp, glockenspiel, viola, and clarinet often playing just one note each. In Webern's hocketization of Schoenberg's concept, timbres are often mixed but not combined. The effect creates a sense of a compound melody, where the pitch content moves more swiftly than the timbres. [16] The music feels contrapuntally dense while it is in fact quite sparse. [17] : 508 In Schoenberg's 1951 letter, he wrote, "My conception of Klangfarbenmelodie would have been fulfilled in Webern’s compositions only in the slightest part." He felt that Webern's understanding of the concept was an error. The impetus for Schoenberg's letter was partially to reclaim ownership of the concept which had become so synonymous with his pupil's work. [8]
In fact, Webern was employing the concept before Schoenberg wrote about it in pieces like Sechs Stücke op. 6 (1909). [18] The first movement of Webern's Symphony op. 21 offers an archetypal example of klangfarbenmelodie, where nearly every pitch is colored by a different instrument. [17] : 506 In Webern's usage, klangenfarbenmelodie articulates the motivic structure of a piece. This is especially evident in his orchestration of the six-part ricercar from Bach's Musical Offering. [19]
Webern's preoccupation with klangenfarbenmelodie continues through his seminal Concerto for Nine Instruments op. 24 (1934). [1] It became a landmark in the development of serial music. Serialism was a continuation of the Second Viennese School's innovations. Composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen systematized musical parameters like pitch, rhythm, and timbre. [4] Klangfarbenmelodie was particularly influential in the development of electronic music. [9]
In music, a tone row or note row, also series or set, is a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets are sometimes found.
A melody, also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of pitch and rhythm, while more figuratively, the term can include other musical elements such as tonal color. It is the foreground to the background accompaniment. A line or part need not be a foreground melody.
Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized European classical music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "The repertory of atonal music is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the occurrence of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar environments".
Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding 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."
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its concision and use of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques in an increasingly rigorous manner, somewhat after the Franco-Flemish School of his studies under Guido Adler. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of the Second Viennese School.
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-century classical music, and a central element of his music was its use of motives as a means of coherence. He propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the "unity of musical space".
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.
In music, serialism is a method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as a form of post-tonal thinking. Twelve-tone technique orders the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations. Other types of serialism also work with sets, collections of objects, but not necessarily with fixed-order series, and extend the technique to other musical dimensions, such as duration, dynamics, and timbre.
The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded equally often in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key.
The Musical Offering, BWV 1079, is a collection of keyboard canons and fugues and other pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, all based on a single musical theme given to him by Frederick the Great, to whom they are dedicated. They were published in September 1747. The Ricercar a 6, a six-voice fugue which is regarded as the high point of the entire work, was put forward by the musicologist Charles Rosen as the most significant piano composition in history. This ricercar is also occasionally called the Prussian Fugue, a name used by Bach himself.
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and / or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions, and directionality.
In music using the twelve-tone technique, derivation is the construction of a row through segments. A derived row is a tone row whose entirety of twelve tones is constructed from a segment or portion of the whole, the generator. Anton Webern often used derived rows in his pieces. A partition is a segment created from a set through partitioning.
In music, a permutation (order) of a set is any ordering of the elements of that set. A specific arrangement of a set of discrete entities, or parameters, such as pitch, dynamics, or timbre. Different permutations may be related by transformation, through the application of zero or more operations, such as transposition, inversion, retrogradation, circular permutation, or multiplicative operations. These may produce reorderings of the members of the set, or may simply map the set onto itself.
Josef Matthias Hauer was an Austrian composer and music theorist. He is best known for developing, independent of and a year or two before Arnold Schoenberg, a method for composing with all 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Hauer was also an important early theorist of twelve-tone music and composition.
The Lyric Suite is a six-movement work for string quartet written by Alban Berg between 1925 and 1926 using methods derived from Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Though publicly dedicated to Alexander von Zemlinsky, the work has been shown to possess a "secret dedication" and to outline a "secret programme".
In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no musical language, or modernist style, ever assumed a dominant position.
Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.
The Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, were composed by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, and first performed in London in 1912. The titles of the pieces, reluctantly added by the composer after the work's completion upon the request of his publisher, are as follows:
Movements is a 1959 five-movement work for piano and orchestra by Igor Stravinsky lasting about ten minutes. It was written during his serial period and shows his dedication to that idiom as well as the influence of Anton Webern.
Neue Musik is the collective term for a wealth of different currents in composed Western art music from around 1910 to the present. Its focus is on compositions of 20th century music. It is characterised in particular by – sometimes radical – expansions of tonal, harmonic, melodic and rhythmic means and forms. It is also characterised by the search for new sounds, new forms or new combinations of old styles, which is partly a continuation of existing traditions, partly a deliberate break with tradition and appears either as progress or as renewal.
Symphony, Op. 21 was composed by Anton Webern between 1927 and 1928. It was his first twelve-tone orchestral work. The two-movement work lasts 10–20 minutes and is full of Alpine topics, abstraction, and intricate musical form, including some fixed register. The Symphony was influenced by Gustav Mahler. Alexander Smallens conducted the world premiere at New York's Town Hall on 18 December 1929.