Tone cluster
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A tone cluster, in Western musical tuning, is a truly simultaneous chord comprised of consecutive tones separated chromatically: for instance, the tones C, C#, D, D#, E, and F, held at the same time. Variants of the tone cluster include chords comprised of tones separated diatonically or pentatonically and played in unison (on a piano, for example, a chord created by striking a set of consecutive black keys). Tone clusters may also be considered secundal chords. In true tone clusters, the notes are sounded and held fully and synchronically, distinguishing them from ornamented figures involving acciaccaturas and the like.
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History
While sporadic examples of tone clusters may be found at least as far back as 1700,Template:Ref not before the second decade of the twentieth century did they assume a recognized place in the Western classical tradition. "Around 1910," Harold C. Schoenberg writes, "Percy Grainger was causing a stir by the near–tone clusters in such works as his Gumsuckers March." Soon, the radical composer-pianist Leo Ornstein began to make similar waves. By mid-decade, Ornstein was publicly performing what appears to be the first composition in Western music to thoroughly integrate true tone clusters: Wild Men's Dance (aka Danse Sauvage; ca. 1913–14).Template:Ref Concurrently, Charles Ives was composing a piece with what would become the most famous individual tone cluster—in the second movement of the Concord Sonata (1911–15, publ. 1920), a single, mammoth chord on the piano, requiring a wooden bar almost fifteen inches long to play. This extraordinary example aside, most piano compositions incorporating tone clusters then and now call for performers to use their own fingers, hands, or arms. Image:Tone cluster.JPG The seminal figure in promoting this harmonic technique was Henry Cowell, whose solo piano piece Dynamic Motion (1916), written when he was nineteen, has been described as "probably the first piece anywhere using secundal chords independently for musical extension and variation." A solo piano piece Cowell wrote the following year, The Tides of Manaunaun (1917; not 1912 as is often erroneously given), 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. Assumed by some to involve an essentially random—or, more kindly, aleatoric—pianistic approach, Cowell explained 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.
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).
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. Bartók's Piano Sonata (1926) and suite Out of Doors (1926), his first significant works after three years in which he produced little, both feature tone clusters. Already, Aaron Copland had composed his Three Moods (aka Trois Esquisses; 1920–21) for piano—its name an apparent homage to a piece of Ornstein's—which includes a triple-forte cluster.
Tone clusters play a major role not only in many subsequent piano works, but in important compositions for larger forces, as well. Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1959), for 52 string instruments, has been described as "a set of variations upon a cluster."> In 1961, György 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). Tone clusters have also been employed by a number of jazz artists, particularly in the realm of free jazz. Cecil Taylor, for instance, has used them extensively as part of his improvisational method since the mid-1960s. Since its beginnings, rock and roll has made use of tone clusters, if usually in a much less deliberate manner—most famously, Jerry Lee Lewis's live-performance piano technique of the 1950s, involving fists, arms, flying feet, and derrière. Composers and arrangers such as Duke Ellington, Thad Jones, Nelson Riddle, and Bob Brookmeyer have used clusters for tonal variety in commercial work.
Notes
- Template:Note See Extremes of Conventional Music Notation—Earliest Usages: 1. Pitch for examples (note that the compiler uses the incorrect 1912 date for Cowell's Tides of Manaunaun). See also Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 46–47, for Battle of Manassas, an interesting American example from 1861.
- Template:Note 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 (Pollock [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.
References
- Anderson, Martin (2002). Liner notes to Leo Ornstein: Piano Music (Hyperion 67320). (Clarification of Suicide in an Airplane dating.) Excerpted online at Sleeve Notes—Ornstein Piano Music
- Bartok, Peter, Moses Asch, Marian Distler, and Sidney Cowell (1963). Liner notes to Henry Cowell: Piano Music (Folkways 3349); revised by Sorrel Hays (1993) (Smithsonian Folkways 40801). (Description of Dynamic Motion: p. 14 [unpaginated].)
- Corozine, Vince (2002). Arranging Music for the Real World: Classical and Commercial Aspects. ISBN 0786649615. (Commercial use: p. 11.)
- Cowell, Henry (1993 [1963]). "Henry Cowell's Comments: The composer describes each of the selections in the order in which they appear." Track 20 of Henry Cowell: Piano Music (Smithsonian Folkways 40801). (Explanation of tone clusters: 12:16–13:14.)
- Hicks, Michael (2002). Henry Cowell, Bohemian. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (Correct dating of early works: pp. 80, 85.)
- Lichtenwanger, William (1986). The Music of Henry Cowell: A Descriptive Catalogue. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn College Institute for Studies in American Music. (Correct dating: passim.)
- Pollack, Howard. (2000 [1999]) Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. (Ornstein's and Copland's Three Moods: p. 44.)
- Schoenberg, Harold C. (1987) The Great Pianists: From Mozart to the Present. New York: Simon & Schuster/Fireside. (Grainger's renown: p. 419.)
External links
- Leo Ornstein artist's website, including a list of properly dated works (many with scores on demand), prepared by his son Severo
Listening
- American Mavericks: Program 1—The Meaning of Maverick three works by Cowell on demand, including Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, whose second movement is titled "Tone Cluster"
- Art of the States: Henry Cowell six works by the composer, including The Tides of Manaunaun and The Harp of Life, with their chromatic and diatonic clusters, and Exultation, which features pentatonic clusters
- Ornstein Piano Music Marc-André Hamelin's performance of Suicide in an Airplane from Leo Ornstein: Piano Music (Hyperion 67320)