Timbre Studies
Every pitch is perceived in a timbre, and every timbre contains pitch, whether definite, indefinite, or multiphonic. Timbre and pitch are simultaneous, codependent, and symbiotic.
I am interested in the functional and expressive roles of timbre in music.
In music, we talk about pitch and rhythm a lot, but we don’t talk often about timbre, or tone color. Through my work, I seek a repositioning toward the inclusion of timbre in conjunction with other musical parameters in our musicological and music theoretical discourse.
Ok, but how do we talk about timbre?
I use innovative means of visually representing musical connections made through timbre.
Timbral progression analysis of Webern’s Fifth Bagatelle for String Quartet, Op. 9, no. 5 (Example 13 from my forthcoming article in Music Theory Online).
Through drawing out these timbral connections, I hope to illustrate how important tone color is in the music we listen to. I am particularly interested in applying this approach to the music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, as well as Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Varèse (among so many more!).
Klangfarbenmelodie
Klangfarbenmelodie is often thought of as creating a “melody of timbres” connected sequentially through time—but Schoenberg refers to such successions as Klangfarbenfolgen (timbres-sequences or timbres-progressions). He asks: “What system underlies these [timbral] progressions?” To which, he theorizes Klangfarbenmelodie by declaring:
Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colors [Klangfarben] that are differentiated according to pitch [Höhe], patterns we call ‘melodies,’ progressions, whose coherence (Zusammenhang) evokes an effect analogous to thought processes, then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colors [Klangfarben] of the other dimension, out of what we call simply ‘tone color’ [Klangfarbe], progressions whose relations with one another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches [Klanghöhen]. (Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, 421)
Klangfarbenmelodie is the notion of organizing Klangfarbenfolgen into timbre-based music. And the different ways of creating timbral progressions—such as the transformative progression in the opening of Schoenberg’s “Farben” (Op. 16, No. 3), the fragmentary progressions often associated with Webern’s atonal music, or the progressions created through timbral similarity that create the wedges in Webern’s Fifth Bagatelle (above)—are different styles of Klangfarbenfolgen.
Additional Research Areas
Musical modernism
Visual arts and music
Music cognition and perception
Auditory scene analysis
Auditory Gestalt principles
