Daniel Barbiero
(These notes aren’t intended to be a
systematic consideration of timbral music; instead, they record some
suggestions and impressions.)
The music of timbre considered qua sound imagines
timbre as something in itself, as a kind of externality. It is concerned with
the qualitative aspects of sound rather than, e.g., their pitch and harmony.
That we hear sounds as rough, smooth,
bright, harsh, resonant, muted, etc. is crucial to music and to the impressions
it gives rise to in us. In a music of timbre, this qualitative dimension of
sound is promoted from a role supplementing pitch and harmony to one of being a
focus in and of itself. Sound, in other words, is here imagined as a value in itself,
as not simply playing a secondary role to pitch and harmony.
A music of timbre is in essence a music of
sound as such.
That we spontaneously hear sounds in terms
of qualities would seem to indicate that sound, even when considered as raw
material, exists for us embedded in a network of meanings, many if not most of
them pre-verbal. The affective power of timbral music consists in this
phenomenological fact.
(Although the music of sound focuses on
sound per se, this does not mean that it cannot be concerned with pitch. It
means that pitch is apprehended from a different angle. Pitches, or tones, can
be considered as sounds in themselves rather than as elements of a melody or
harmonic structure.)
Analogies to the visual arts here are
helpful and perhaps even unavoidable.
In a 1965 conversation with Whitechapel Gallery director Bryan Robertson, the
painter Robert Motherwell asserted that “painting is…concrete…For example, I
think of color as a thing, not as an abstraction. For Motherwell’s “painting,”
substitute “music;” for “color,” substitute “timbre.”
Or, think of sound as a raw material to be
sculpted.
Regarding the sculpting of sounds, of
letting events be defined by timbre rather than by pitch and harmony, an
analogy would be to so-called Minimalist sculpture—instead of “what you see is
what you see” (Frank Stella), “what you hear is what you hear.” If the subject
matter of a Minimalist sculpture is the material out of which it’s made, the subject
matter of timbral music is the medium and manner in which sound is made:
Parodying Marshall McLuhan, one can say that the medium and the manner are the
message.
The medium is the instrument through which
the sound is created.
The manner is the way the instrument is
played.
The two critical elements here are the
material the instrument is made of and the actions required to produce sound
from it. In each case, a body is involved: The body of the instrument; the body
of the performer.
Within the context of sound-centered music
the piece or performance is thus to a large extent about instrument and
technique. Timbre is something like a natural sign telling of the instrument on
which it was created and the technique applied to the instrument.
Because timbre is so closely bound up with
the material platform on which sounds are produced, the physical aspects of the
instrument will be put forward into the listener’s awareness: Timbre is how we
distinguish strings from winds from percussion from other sound
sources—contrabasses from contrabassoons, English horns from French horns.
The rasp of horsehair under pressure
against strings, the slap of a palm against wood or membrane, the vibration of
a reed in a windstream—these sounds, framed within the musical performance,
foreground the rich materiality underlying the production of even the most
conventional music. The instrument
becomes a thing expressing its fundamental qualities through the intercession
of the performer—the materiality of the instrument binds the performance in a
decisive way.
As does the activity of the performer:
Timbre is indicative of his or her gesture as realized in relation to the
instrument.
In a music of sound, extended technique has
a particularly important role to play. Expanded methods of sound production
exploit a broad range of timbres available to an instrument, allowing the
physical material to play a role in the creation of sound independent of pitch
or conventional notions of musicality. In this way extended technique extends
the range of acceptable sounds beyond pitch to sound as such.
A solo performance in which the performer
draws on the broad span of techniques available to the contemporary
instrumentalist is, in its range of possibilities, a performance in which the
piece is coextensive with the instrument in all of its facets.