Tone cluster

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Example of piano tone clusters. The clusters in the upper staff—C♯ D♯ F♯ G♯—are four successive black keys. The last two bars, played with overlapping hands, are a more dense cluster.

A tone cluster is a musical chord comprising consecutive tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale, and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys (such as C, C♯, and D) struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster. Variants of the tone cluster include chords comprising consecutive tones separated diatonically, pentatonically, or microtonally. On the piano, such clusters often involve the simultaneous striking of successive white or black keys.

The early years of the twentieth century saw pioneering works by ragtime artists Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin use tone clusters in central roles. In the 1910s, two classical avant-gardists, composer-pianists Leo Ornstein and Henry Cowell, were recognized as making the first extensive explorations of the tone cluster. During the same period, Charles Ives employed them in several compositions that were not publicly performed until the late 1920s or 1930s. Béla Bartók and, later, other composers including Lou Harrison and Karlheinz Stockhausen became proponents of the tone cluster. Today, tone clusters play a significant role in the work of free jazz musicians such as Cecil Taylor and Matthew Shipp, as well as the work of many modern classical composers.

In most Western music, tone clusters tend to be heard as dissonant. Keyboard instruments, because of the arrangement of the playing area, particularly lend themselves to the performance of tone clusters, but clusters may be performed with almost any individual instrument on which three or more notes can be played simultaneously, as well as by most groups of instruments or voices.

Music theory and classification

Prototypical tone clusters are chords of three or more adjacent notes on the chromatic scale, that is, three or more consecutive pitches each separated by only a semitone. As described by David Nicholls,

Tone-clusters are essentially chords built from major and minor seconds. At the simplest level, a C major triad with added second, sixth and seventh could be said to consist of two tone-clusters, as could a pentatonic, black-note or white-note, chord. More usually, though, the tone-cluster will consist of a larger number of adjacent pitches, either diatonic (white-note), pentatonic (black-note), or chromatic (white and black notes).[1]

While three-note stacks based on diatonic and pentatonic scales are technically tone clusters, they involve intervals between notes greater than the half-tone gaps of the chromatic kind—because of this, as may be inferred from Nicholls, commentators tend to identify diatonic and pentatonic stacks as "tone clusters" only when they consist of four or more successive notes struck simultaneously. Stacks of three or more adjacent microtonal pitches also constitute tone clusters. In Western classical music practice, all tone clusters are classifiable as secundal chords—that is, the interval between two consecutive notes in a cluster is never more than three semitones. Historically, tone clusters were sometimes discussed with a hint of disdain. One 1969 textbook defines the cluster as "an extra-harmonic clump of notes."[2]

In tone clusters, the notes are sounded fully and simultaneously, distinguishing them from ornamented figures involving acciaccaturas and the like. Their effect also tends to be very different: where ornamentation is used to draw attention to the harmony or the relationship between harmony and melody, tone clusters are for the most part employed as independent sounds. They also lend themselves to use in a percussive manner. Tone clusters have generally been thought of as dissonant musical textures, and even defined as such.[3] As noted by Alan Belkin, however, instrumental timbre can have a significant impact on their effect: "Clusters are quite aggressive on the organ, but soften enormously when played by strings (possibly because slight, continuous fluctuations of pitch in the latter provide some inner mobility)."[4] In his first published work on the topic, Henry Cowell observed that a tone cluster is "more pleasing" and "acceptable to the ear if its outer limits form a consonant interval."[5]

Notation and execution

Henry Cowell's notation of white- and black-note clusters for piano

With his 1917 piece The Tides of Manaunaun, Cowell introduced a new notation for tone clusters on the piano or other keyboard instrument. In this notation style, only the top and bottom notes of the cluster, connected by a single line or pair of lines, were represented.[6] This developed into the solid-bar style seen in the image on the right. Here the first chord, stretching two octaves from D2 to D4, is a white-note cluster, symbolized by the natural sign below the staff. The second is a black-note cluster, symbolized by the flat sign (a sharp sign would be required if the notes showing the limit of the cluster were spelled as sharps). A chromatic cluster—black and white keys together—is shown in this method by including both a natural and a flat (or sharp) sign with the chord.

The performance of keyboard tone clusters is widely considered an "extended technique"—large clusters require unusual playing methods often involving the fist, the flat of the hand, or the forearm. Thelonious Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen each performed clusters with their elbows; Stockhausen developed a method for playing cluster glissandi with special gloves.[7] Don Pullen would play moving clusters by rolling the backs of his hands over the keyboard. Boards of various dimension are sometimes employed, as in the Concord Sonata (ca. 1904–19) of Charles Ives; they can be weighted down to execute clusters of long duration. For works such as his Piano Concerto (1985) and Grand Duo (1988), Lou Harrison's scores call for the use of an "octave bar," a wooden device especially crafted for cluster playing.

Use in Western music

Sporadic examples of tone clusters may be found in Western classical music compositions at least as far back as the late 1600s.[8] A solo piano score, Battle of Manassas, written in 1861 by "Blind Tom" Bethune, instructs the pianist to represent cannon fire at various points by striking "with the flat of the hand, as many notes as possible, and with as much force as possible, at the bass of the piano."[9] Published in 1866, it is the earliest composition on record to call for more than a passing cluster, though Bethune's are not specifically notated.[10] In 1887, Giuseppe Verdi became the first important composer in the Western tradition to write an unmistakable chromatic cluster: Otello opens with an organ cluster (C, C♯, D) that also has the longest notated duration of any scored musical texture known.[11] But it was not before the second decade of the twentieth century that tone clusters assumed a recognized place in Western classical music practice.

In early-20th-century classical compositions

Leo Ornstein was the first composer to be widely known for using tone clusters—though the term itself was not yet used to describe the radical aspect of his work.

"Around 1910," Harold C. Schoenberg writes, "Percy Grainger was causing a stir by the near–tone clusters in such works as his Gumsuckers March."[12] In 1911, what appears to be the first published classical composition to thoroughly integrate true tone clusters was issued: Tintamarre (The Clangor of Bells), by Canadian composer J. Humfrey Anger (1862–1913).[13]

Within a few years, the radical composer-pianist Leo Ornstein became one of the most famous figures in classical music on both sides of the Atlantic for his performances of cutting-edge work. In 1914, Ornstein debuted several of his own solo piano compositions: Wild Men's Dance (aka Danse Sauvage; ca. 1913–14), Impressions of the Thames (ca. 1913–14), and Impressions of Notre Dame (ca. 1913–14) were the first works to explore the tone cluster in depth ever heard by a substantial audience. Wild Men's Dance, in particular, was constructed almost entirely out of clusters.[14] In 1918, critic Charles L. Buchanan described Ornstein's innovation: "[He] gives us masses of shrill, hard dissonances, chords consisting of anywhere from eight to a dozen notes made up of half tones heaped one upon another."[15]

Clusters were also beginning to appear in more pieces by European composers. The Thomas de Hartmann score for Vassily Kandinsky's stage show The Yellow Sound (1909) employs a chromatic cluster at two climactic points.[16] Alban Berg's Four Pieces for clarinet and piano (1913) calls for clusters along with other avant-garde keyboard techniques.[17] Claude Debussy's 1915 arrangement for solo piano of his Six Epigraphes Antiques (1914), originally a set of piano duets, includes tone clusters in the fifth piece, Pour l'Egyptienne.[18]

Though much of his work was made public only years later, Charles Ives had been exploring the possibilities of the tone cluster for some time. In 1906–7, Ives composed his first mature piece to extensively feature tone clusters, Scherzo: Over the Pavements.[19] Orchestrated for a nine-piece ensemble, it includes both black- and white-note clusters for the piano.[20] Revised in 1913, it would not be recorded and published until the 1950s and would have to wait until 1963 to receive its first public performance. During the same period that Ornstein was introducing tone clusters to the concert stage, Ives was developing a piece with what would become the most famous set of clusters: in the second movement, Hawthorne, of the Concord Sonata (ca. 1904–19, publ. 1920, prem. 1928), mammoth piano chords, some gentle, some violent, require a wooden bar almost fifteen inches long to play.[21] Between 1911 and 1913, Ives also wrote ensemble pieces with tone clusters such as his Second String Quartet and the orchestral Decoration Day and Fourth of July, though none of these would be publicly performed before the 1930s.[22]

In the work of Henry Cowell

As a composer, performer, and theorist, Henry Cowell was largely responsible for establishing the tone cluster in the lexicon of modern classical music.

In June 1913, a sixteen-year-old Californian with no formal musical training wrote a solo piano piece, Adventures in Harmony, employing "primitive tone clusters."[23] Henry Cowell would soon emerge as the seminal figure in promoting the cluster harmonic technique. Ornstein abandoned the concert stage in the early 1920s and, anyway, clusters had served him as practical harmonic devices, not as part of a larger theoretical mission. In the case of Ives, clusters comprised a relatively small part of his compositional output, much of which went unheard for years. For the intellectually ambitious Cowell—who heard Ornstein perform in New York in 1916—clusters were crucial to the future of music. He set out to explore their "overall, cumulative, and often programmatic effects."[24]

Dynamic Motion (1916) for solo piano, written when Cowell was nineteen, has been described as "probably the first piece anywhere using secundal chords independently for musical extension and variation."[25] Though that is not quite accurate, it does appear to be the first piece to employ chromatic clusters in such a manner. A solo piano piece Cowell wrote the following year, The Tides of Manaunaun (1917), would prove to be his most popular work and the composition most responsible for establishing the tone cluster as a significant element in Western classical music. (Cowell's early piano works are often erroneously dated; in the two cases above, as 1914 and 1912, respectively.[26]) Assumed by some to involve an essentially random—or, more kindly, aleatoric—pianistic approach, Cowell would explain that precision is required in the writing and performance of tone clusters no less than with any other musical feature:

Tone clusters...on the piano [are] whole scales of tones used as chords, or at least three contiguous tones along a scale being used as a chord. And, at times, if these chords exceed the number of tones that you have fingers on your hand, it may be necessary to play these either with the flat of the hand or sometimes with the full forearm. This is not done from the standpoint of trying to devise a new piano technique, although it actually amounts to that, but rather because this is the only practicable method of playing such large chords. It should be obvious that these chords are exact and that one practices diligently in order to play them with the desired tone quality and to have them absolutely precise in nature.[27]

Historian and critic Kyle Gann describes the broad range of ways in which Cowell constructed (and thus performed) his clusters and used them as musical textures, "sometimes with a top note brought out melodically, sometimes accompanying a left-hand melody in parallel."[28]

Beginning in 1921, with an article serialized in The Freeman, an Irish cultural journal, Cowell popularized the term tone cluster.[29] While he did not coin the phrase, as is often claimed, he appears to have been the first to use it with its current meaning.[30] During the 1920s and 1930s, Cowell toured widely through North America and Europe, playing his own experimental works, many built around tone clusters. In addition to The Tides of Manaunaun, Dynamic Motion, and its five "encores"—What's This (1917), Amiable Conversation (1917), Advertisement (1917), Antinomy (1917, rev. 1959; frequently misspelled "Antimony"), and Time Table (1917)—these include The Voice of Lir (1920), Exultation (1921), The Harp of Life (1924), Snows of Fujiyama (1924), Lilt of the Reel (1930), and Deep Color (1938). Tiger (1930) has the single largest chord ever written for an individual instrument: 53 notes.[31] Along with Ives, Cowell wrote some of the first large-ensemble pieces to make extensive use of clusters. The Birth of Motion (ca. 1920), his earliest such effort, combines orchestral clusters with glissando.[32] "Tone Cluster," the second movement of Cowell's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928, prem. 1978), employs a wide variety of clusters for the piano and each instrumental group.[33] From a quarter-century later, his Symphony No. 11 (1953) features a sliding chromatic cluster played by muted violins.[34]

In his theoretical work New Musical Resources (1930), a major influence on the classical avant-garde for many decades, Cowell argued that clusters should not be employed simply for color:

In harmony it is often better for the sake of consistency to maintain a whole succession of clusters, once they are begun; since one alone, or even two, may be heard as a mere effect, rather than as an independent and significant procedure, carried with musical logic to its inevitable conclusion.[35]

In later classical music

Béla Bartók and Henry Cowell met in December 1923. Early the next year, the great Hungarian composer wrote Cowell to ask whether he might adopt tone clusters without causing offense.

In 1922, composer Dane Rudhyar, a friend of Cowell's, declared approvingly that the development of the tone cluster "imperilled [the] existence" of "the musical unit, the note."[36] While that threat was not to be realized, clusters began to appear in the works of a growing number of composers. Already, Aaron Copland had written his Three Moods (aka Trois Esquisses; 1920–21) for piano—its name an apparent homage to a piece of Leo Ornstein's—which includes a triple-forte cluster.[37] The most renowned composer to be directly inspired by Cowell's demonstrations of his tone cluster pieces was Béla Bartók, who requested Cowell's permission to employ the method.[38] Bartók's Piano Sonata (1926) and Out of Doors (1926), his first significant works after three years in which he produced little, both feature tone clusters. In the 1930s, Cowell's student Lou Harrison utilized keyboard clusters in several works such as his Prelude for Grandpiano (1937).[39] At least as far back as 1942, John Cage, who also studied under Cowell, began writing piano pieces with cluster chords; In the Name of the Holocaust, from December of that year, includes chromatic, diatonic, and pentatonic clusters.[40] Olivier Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus (1944), considered by many to be the most important solo piano piece of the first half of the twentieth century, employs clusters throughout.[41] They would feature in numerous subsequent piano works, by a wide range of composers. Karlheinz Stockhausen and George Crumb are among those who have employed them frequently.

While tone clusters are coventionally associated with the piano, and the solo piano repertoire in particular, they have also assumed important roles in compositions for chamber groups and larger ensembles. Robert Reigle identifies Croatian composer Josip Slavenski's organ-and-violin Sonata Religiosa (1925), with its sustained chromatic clusters, as "a missing link between Ives and [György] Ligeti."[42] Bartók employs both diatonic and chromatic clusters in his Fourth String Quartet (1928).[43] The sound mass technique in such works as Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet (1931) and Iannis Xenakis's Metastasis (1955) is an elaboration of the tone cluster. In one of the most famous pieces associated with the sound mass aesthetic, Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1959), for fifty-two string instruments, the quarter-tone clusters "see[m] to have abstracted and intensified the features that define shrieks of terror and keening cries of sorrow."[44] In 1961, Ligeti wrote perhaps the largest cluster chord ever—in the orchestral Atmosphères, every note in the chromatic scale over a range of five octaves is played at once (quietly). In R. Murray Schafer's choral Epitaph for Moonlight (1968), a tone cluster is constructed by dividing each choir section (soprano/alto/tenor/bass) into four parts. Each hums a note one semitone lower than the note hummed by the previous section, until all sixteen parts are contributing to the cluster.[45] In Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1971), "Wordless vocal tone clusters seep out through the skeletal arrangements of viola, celeste, and percussion."[46] Aldo Clementi's chamber ensemble piece Ceremonial (1973) evokes both Verdi and Ives, combining the original extended-duration and mass cluster concepts: a weighted wooden board placed on an electric harmonium maintains a tone cluster throughout the work.[47] Judith Bingham's Prague (1995) gives a brass band the opportunity to create tone clusters.[48] Keyboard clusters are set against orchestral forces in piano concertos such as Einojuhani Rautavaara's first (1969) and Esa-Pekka Salonen's (2007), the latter suggestive of Messiaen.[49] The choral compositions of Eric Whitacre often employ clusters.[50]

Three composers who made frequent use of tone clusters for a wide variety of ensembles are Giacinto Scelsi, Alfred Schnittke—both of whom often worked with them in microtonal contexts—and Lou Harrison. Scelsi employed them for much of his career, including in his last large-scale work, Pfhat (1974), which premiered in 1986.[51] They are found in works of Schnittke's ranging from the Quintet for Piano and Strings (1972–76), where "microtonal strings fin[d] tone clusters between the cracks of the piano keys,"[52] to the choral Psalms of Repentance (1988). Harrison's many pieces featuring clusters include Pacifika Rondo (1963), Concerto for Organ with Percussion (1973), Piano Concerto (1983–85), Three Songs for male chorus (1985), Grand Duo (1988), and Rhymes with Silver (1996).[53] With his partner William Colvig, Harrison developed a device to facilitate high-speed keyboard cluster performance:

the "octave bar," a flat wooden device approximately two inches high with a grip on top and sponge rubber on the bottom, with which the player strikes the keys. Its length spans an octave on a grand piano. The sponge rubber bottom is sculpted so that its ends are slightly lower than its center, making the outer tones of the octave sound with greater force than the intermediary pitches. The pianist can thus rush headlong through fearfully rapid passages, precisely spanning an octave at each blow.[54]

In jazz

File:ScottJoplin.jpg
Scott Joplin wrote the first known published composition to include a musical sequence built around notated tone clusters.

Tone clusters have been employed by jazz artists in a variety of styles, since the very beginning of the form. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Storyville pianist Jelly Roll Morton began performing a ragtime adaptation of a French quadrille, introducing large chromatic tone clusters played by his left forearm. The growling effect led to Morton dubbing the piece his "Tiger Rag."[55] In 1909, Scott Joplin's deliberately experimental "Wall Street Rag" included a section prominently featuring notated tone clusters—apparently the first published work in the history of Western music to do so.[56] The fourth of Artie Matthews's Pastime Rags (1913–20) features dissonant right-hand clusters.[57] Thelonious Monk, in pieces such as "Introspection" (1946) and "Off Minor" (1947), uses clusters as dramatic figures within the central improvisation and to accent the tension at its conclusion.[58] They are heard on Art Tatum's "Mr. Freddy Blues" (1950), undergirding the cross-rhythms.[59] By 1953, Dave Brubeck was employing piano tone clusters and dissonance in a manner anticipating the style free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor would soon develop.[60] The approach of hard bop pianist Horace Silver is an even clearer antecedent to Taylor's use of clusters.[61] During the same era, clusters appear as punctuation marks in the lead lines of Herbie Nichols.[62] In "The Gig" (1955), described by Francis Davis as Nichols's masterpiece, "clashing notes and tone clusters depic[t] a pickup band at odds with itself about what to play."[63] Recorded examples of Duke Ellington's piano cluster work include "Summertime" (1961) and ...And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967).[64]

In jazz, as in classical music, tone clusters have not been restricted to the keyboard. In the 1930s, the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra's "Stratosphere" included ensemble clusters among an array of progressive elements.[65] The Stan Kenton Orchestra's April 1947 recording of "If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight," arranged by Pete Rugolo, features a dramatic four-note trombone cluster at the end of the second chorus.[66] As described by critic Fred Kaplan, a 1950 performance by the Duke Ellington Orchestra features arrangements with the collective "blowing rich, dark, tone clusters that evoke Ravel."[67] In the early 1960s, arrangements by Bob Brookmeyer and Gerry Mulligan for Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band employed tone clusters in a dense style calling to mind both Ellington and Ravel.[68] The "tart tone cluster" that "pierces a song's surfaces and penetrates to its heart" has been described as a specialty of guitarist Jim Hall's.[69]

Clusters are especially prevalent in the realm of free jazz. Cecil Taylor has used them extensively as part of his improvisational method since the mid-1950s.[70] Like much of his musical vocabulary, his clusters operate "on a continuum somewhere between melody and percussion."[71] One of Taylor's primary purposes in adopting clusters was to avoid the dominance of any specific pitch.[72] Leading free jazz composer, bandleader, and pianist Sun Ra often used them to rearrange the musical furniture, as described by scholar John F. Szwed:

When he sensed that [a] piece needed an introduction or an ending, a new direction or fresh material, he would call for a space chord, a collectively improvised tone cluster at high volume which "would suggest a new melody, maybe a rhythm." It was a pianistically conceived device which created another context for the music, a new mood, opening up fresh tonal areas.[73]

As free jazz spread in the 1960s, so did the use of tone clusters. In comparison with what John Litweiler describes as Taylor's "endless forms and contrasts," the solos of Muhal Richard Abrams employ tone clusters in a similarly free, but more lyrical, flowing context.[74] Guitarist Sonny Sharrock made them a central part of his improvisations, executing "glass-shattering tone clusters that sounded like someone was ripping the pickups out of the guitar without having bothered to unplug it from its overdriven amplifier."[75] Pianist Marilyn Crispell has been another major free jazz proponent of the tone cluster, frequently in collaboration with Anthony Braxton, who played with Abrams early in his career.[76] Since the 1990s, Matthew Shipp has built on Taylor's innovations with the form.[77] European free jazz pianists who have contributed to the development of the tone cluster palette include Gunter Hampel and Alexander von Schlippenbach.[78]

Don Pullen, who bridged free and mainstream jazz, "had a technique of rolling his wrists as he improvised—the outside edges of his hands became scarred from it—to create moving tone clusters. Building up from arpeggios, he could create eddies of noise on the keyboard...like concise Cecil Taylor outbursts."[79] John Medeski employs tone clusters as keyboardist for Medeski, Martin, and Wood, which mixes free jazz elements into its soul jazz/jam band style.[80]

In popular music

Like jazz, rock and roll has made use of tone clusters since its birth, if characteristically in a less deliberate manner—most famously, Jerry Lee Lewis's live-performance piano technique of the 1950s, involving fists, arms, flying feet, and derrière. On The Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray," recorded in September 1967, organist John Cale uses tone clusters within the context of a drone; the song is apparently the closest approximation on record of the band's early live sound.[81] Around the same time, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek began introducing clusters into his solos during live performances of the band's hit "Light My Fire."[82] Kraftwerk's self-titled 1970 debut album employs organ clusters to add variety to its repeated tape sequences.[83] Composers and arrangers such as Duke Ellington, Thad Jones, Nelson Riddle, and Bob Brookmeyer have used clusters for variety in commercial work and they are employed often in the scoring of horror and science-fiction films.[84]

Use in other music

In traditional Japanese gagaku, the imperial court music, a tone cluster performed on shõ (a type of mouth organ) is generally employed as a harmonic matrix.[85] Lou Harrison's Pacifika Rondo, which mixes Eastern and Western instrumentation and styles, mirrors this approach—sustained organ clusters emulate the sound and function of the shõ.[86] Malayan folk musicians employ a mouth organ that similarly produces tone clusters.[87] The characteristic musical form played on the bin-baja, a strummed harp of central India's Pardhan people, has been described as a "rhythmic ostinato on a tone cluster."[88]

Notes

  1. ^ Nicholls (1991), p. 155.
  2. ^ Ostransky (1969), p. 208.
  3. ^ See, e.g., Seachrist (2003), p. 215, n. 15: "A 'tone cluster' is a dissonant group of tones lying close together...."
  4. ^ Belkin, Alan (2003). "Harmony and Texture; Orchestration and Harmony/Timbre". Université de Montréal. Retrieved 2007-08-18.
  5. ^ Cowell (1921), pp. 112, 113.
  6. ^ The score of The Tides of Manaunaun is reprinted in American Piano Classics: 39 Works by Gottschalk, Griffes, Gershwin, Copland, and Others, ed. Joseph Smith (Mineola, N.Y.: Courier Dover, 2001; ISBN 0-486-41377-2), pp. 43 et seq.
  7. ^ Tyranny, "Blue" Gene (2003-10-01). "88 Keys to Freedom: Segues Through the History of American Piano Music—The Keyboard Goes Bop! and the Melody Spins Off into Eternity (1939 to 1952)". NewMusicBox. American Music Center. Retrieved 2007-08-20. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) Cooke (1998), p. 205.
  8. ^ For examples, see "Earliest Usages: 1. Pitch" in Byrd, Donald (2007-07-14). "Extremes of Conventional Music Notation". Indiana University, School of Informatics. Retrieved 2007-08-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  9. ^ Quoted in Altman (2004), p. 47.
  10. ^ Altman (2004), pp. 46–47.
  11. ^ See "Earliest Usages: 1. Pitch" and "Duration and Rhythm: 2. Longest notated duration, including ties" in Extremes of Conventional Music Notation.
  12. ^ Schoenberg (1987), p. 419.
  13. ^ For a discussion of the piece, see Keillor, Elaine (2004-05-10). "Writing for a Market—Canadian Musical Composition Before the First World War". Library and Archives Canada/Bibliothèque et Archives Canada. Retrieved 2007-08-20. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) The score of Tintamarre and its publication record are also available online via Library and Archives Canada/Bibliothèque et Archives Canada. See also Keillor (2000) and "Anger, Humfrey". Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2007-08-20. The early performance history of Tintamarre has not been established.
  14. ^ See Broyles (2004), p. 78, for premiere of these works. The piano music for Ornstein's Sonata for Violin and Piano, op. 31 (1915; not 1913 as is often erroneously given), also employs true tone clusters, though not to the extent of Wild Men's Dance. Three Moods (ca. 1914) for solo piano has been said to contain clusters (Pollack [2000], p. 44); perusal online of the published score, however, does not reveal any. Ornstein's solo piano piece Suicide in an Airplane (n.d.), which makes incontrovertible use of tone clusters in one extended passage, is often erroneously dated "1913" or "ca. 1913"; in fact, it is undated and there is no record of its existence before 1919 (Anderson [2002]).
  15. ^ Quoted in Chase (1992), p. 450.
  16. ^ Finney (1967), p. 74.
  17. ^ Pino (1998), p. 258.
  18. ^ Hinson (1990), pp. 43–44.
  19. ^ Thomas B. Holmes notes that the song Majority (aka The Masses), written by Ives in 1888 at the age of fourteen, incorporates tone clusters in the piano accompaniment. He correctly describes this as "a rebellious act for a beginning composer." He errs in calling it "probably the first documented use of a tone cluster in a score" (Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition [New York and London: Routledge, 2002 (1985); ISBN 0-415-93643-8], p. 35). Swafford (1998) observes that Ives chose to begin his 114 Songs (publ. 1922) with the work (pp. 227, 271, 325). And he too miscredits Ives with the "invention of the tone cluster" (p. 231). On the other hand, he valuably points to Ives's awareness that "tone clusters...had been there since time immemorial when large groups sang. The mistakes were part of the music" (p. 98).
  20. ^ Nicholls (1991), p. 57.
  21. ^ Reed (2005), p. 59; Swafford (1998), p. 262.
  22. ^ Swafford (1998), pp. 251, 252, 472, for descriptions; Sinclair (1999), passim, for proper dating of Scherzo: Over the Pavements, Concord Sonata, and other named pieces: Second String Quartet (1911–13, prem. 1946, publ. 1954); Decoration Day (ca. 1912–13, rev. ca. 1923–24, prem. 1931, publ. 1962); Fourth of July (ca. 1911–13, rev. ca. 1931, publ./prem. 1932).
  23. ^ Nicholls (1991), p. 134.
  24. ^ Broyles (2004), p. 342, n. 10.
  25. ^ Bartok et al. (1963), p. 14 (unpaginated).
  26. ^ Correct dating of Cowell's early works is per Hicks (2002), pp. 80, 85. Correct dating of Cowell's work in general is per the standard catalogue, Lichtenwanger (1986).
  27. ^ Cowell (1993), 12:16–13:14.
  28. ^ Gann, Kyle (2003-10-21). "Rosen's Sins of American Omission". ArtsJournal. Retrieved 2007-08-18. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  29. ^ Hicks (2002), pp. 106–108.
  30. ^ See Seachrist (2003), p. 215, n. 15, for an example of a claim that the "term was invented by Henry Cowell." Tone cluster had been used with a different meaning since at least 1910 by music theorist and educator Percy Goetschius: referring to an example of three-part counterpoint, "there is some good chord-form at almost every accent, some harmonic tone-cluster towards which the parts unanimously lead" (Exercises in Elementary Counterpoint, 5th ed. [New York: G. Schirmer], p. 111). See also his correspondence, "Schoenberg's 'Harmony,'" in The New Music Review and Church Music Review, vol. 14, no. 168 (November 1915), p. 404: "I have regretted that I did not, in revising my 'Material,' lay still greater stress upon the accidental tone-clusters such as you illustrate"; "in Ex. 318, No. 5, you will find the Mozart tone-cluster which you give in your Ex. 11."
  31. ^ "Other: 1. Vertical extremes" in Extremes of Conventional Music Notation.
  32. ^ Yunwha Rao (2004), p. 245.
  33. ^ Zwenzner (2001), p. 13.
  34. ^ Yunwha Rao (2004), p. 138.
  35. ^ Quoted in Gann (1997), p. 174.
  36. ^ Quoted in Hicks (2002), p. 108.
  37. ^ Pollack (2000), p. 44.
  38. ^ Stevens (1993), p. 67.
  39. ^ Miller and Lieberman (2004), pp. 10, 135.
  40. ^ Salzman (1996), p. 3 (unpaginated).
  41. ^ Meister (2006), p. 131–132.
  42. ^ Reigle, Robert (April 2002). "Forgotten Gems". La Folia. Retrieved 2007-08-19.
  43. ^ Trueman, Daniel (1999). "Three "Classical" Violins and a Fiddle" (PDF). Reinventing the Violin. Princeton University, Department of Music. Retrieved 2007-08-19. See also Robin Stowell, "Extending the Technical and Expressive Frontiers," in The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, ed. Stowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; ISBN 0-521-80194-X), pp. 149–173; p. 162.
  44. ^ Hogan (2003), p. 179.
  45. ^ Swift (1972), pp. 511–512.
  46. ^ Swan, Glenn. "Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel (1971) for Chorus, Viola and Percussion/Why Patterns? (1978) (review)". All Music Guide. WindowsMedia. Retrieved 2007-08-18.
  47. ^ Hinson and Roberts (2006), p. 624.
  48. ^ Hindmarsh, Paul. "The Regional Test Pieces 2003". 4barsrest.com. Retrieved 2007-08-19.
  49. ^ Tommasini (2007).
  50. ^ "Brigham Young Univ. Singers: Eric Whitacre: Complete A Cappella Works (review)". a-capella.com. 2002. Retrieved 2008-02-25. Paulin, Scott (2006). "Whitacre: Cloudburst and Other Choral Works (review)". Barnes & Noble. Retrieved 2008-02-25.
  51. ^ Halbreich (1988), pp. 9, 11 (unpaginated).
  52. ^ Drury, Stephen (2005-02-15). "Callithumpian Consort Announces March Fund Rasing Concert at West Roxbury's Theodore Parker Church". Callithumpian Consort. Retrieved 2007-08-18. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  53. ^ Miller and Lieberman (2004), pp. 10, 99, 135, 155.
  54. ^ Miller and Lieberman (2004), p. 135.
  55. ^ Lomax (2001), pp. 66–69; Spaeth (1948), p. 420.
  56. ^ See Floyd (1995), p. 72; Berlin (1994), p. 187.
  57. ^ Magee (1998), p. 402.
  58. ^ Meadows (2003), ch. 10.
  59. ^ Harrison (1997), p. 315.
  60. ^ "Jazz Legends: Dave Brubeck". Jazz Improv. Retrieved 2007-08-18.
  61. ^ Hazell (1997); Litweiler (1990), p. 202. See also Watrous (1989).
  62. ^ Litweiler (1990), p. 23.
  63. ^ Davis (2004), p. 78.
  64. ^ Blumenfeld, Larry/Szwed, John F. (ed. Gary Giddins) (1999-06-15). "Rockin' in Rhythm". Village Voice. Retrieved 2007-08-20. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  65. ^ Determeyer (2006), p. 78.
  66. ^ Vosbein, Terry (January 2002). "Pete Rugolo and Progressive Jazz". Self-published (scholarly paper by established composer and educator presented at the IAJE International Conference, Chicago). Retrieved 2007-08-17.
  67. ^ Kaplan, Fred (2004-12-22). "All That Jazz: The Year's Best Records". Slate. Retrieved 2007-08-18. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  68. ^ Kaplan, Fred (2003). "Jazz Capsules: The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Band Sessions". AVguide.com. Retrieved 2007-08-18.
  69. ^ Palmer (1986).
  70. ^ Litweiler (1990), p. 202. See also Anderson (2006), pp. 57–58.
  71. ^ Pareles (1988).
  72. ^ Anderson (2006), p. 111.
  73. ^ Szwed (1998), p. 214.
  74. ^ Litweiler (1990), p. 182.
  75. ^ Palmer (1991).
  76. ^ Enstice and Stockhouse (2004), p. 81.
  77. ^ Weinstein (1996).
  78. ^ Svirchev, Laurence (2006). ""If You Start from Point-Zero, You Have to Imagine Something": An Interview with Alexander von Schlippenbach". Jazz Journalists Association Library. Retrieved 2007-08-17.
  79. ^ Ratliff (2002), p. 205.
  80. ^ Pareles (2000).
  81. ^ Schwartz (1996), pp. 97, 94.
  82. ^ Hicks (1999), p. 88.
  83. ^ Bussy (2004), p. 31.
  84. ^ Corozine (2002), p. 11. For a discussion of the use of tone clusters in film scoring, see David Huckvale, "Twins of Evil: An Investigation into the Aesthetics of Film Music," Popular Music, vol. 9, no. 1 (January 1990), pp. 1–35. For a description of their role in two individual films, see Shuhei Hosokawa, "Atomic Overtones and Primitive Undertones: Akira Ifukube's Sound Design for Godzilla," in Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Publ., 2004; ISBN 0-86196-644-9), pp. 42–60; n. 21, p. 60; and, for Close Encounters, Neil Lerner, "Nostalgia, Masculinist Discourse, and Authoritarianism in John Williams' Scores for Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind," in Off the Planet, pp. 96–107; 105–106.
  85. ^ Malm (2000), pp. 116–117.
  86. ^ Miller and Lieberman (2004), p. 155.
  87. ^ Musical Courier 164 (1962), p. 12.
  88. ^ Knight (1985).

Sources

External links

  • Leo Ornstein Scores several scores, including Wild Men's Dance, featuring tone clusters
  • "New Growth from New Soil" 2004–5 master's thesis on Cowell with detailed consideration of his use of tone clusters (though both The Tides of Manaunaun and Dynamic Motion are misdated); by Stephanie N. Stallings

Listening

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