Translations: Adorno and Dahlhaus

This article provides an introduction to the English translations of texts on timbre and orchestration by German scholars Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus. The Adorno text, “The Function of Timbre in Music,” is based on a series of lectures he gave at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in 1966, while Dahlhaus’ essay “On the Theory of Instrumentation” was originally published in the journal Die Musikforschung in 1985. This introduction gives an overview into the differing approaches of the two authors to the problem of musical timbre and briefly considers the challenges presented in the translation of German words such as Klang, Farbe, and Klangfarbe.

The Function of Timbre in Music (1966)

Adorno’s purpose in these lectures, presented at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in the fall of 1966, was to address the relationship between what he called “sound” and “structure.” At the heart of his thinking is the notion of “structural instrumentation”—the ideal of organizing timbre in a manner commensurate to the compositional logic (Satz) of a given work. Following a historical survey of orchestration and instrumentation in the music of Bach, Viennese Classicism, and the New German School, Adorno turns at length to the “new music,” and above all the work of the Second Viennese School. Ending with a brief consideration of the experiments in Klangkomposition undertaken by composers such as Stockhausen and Ligeti, Adorno challenges the younger generation of composers who held court at Darmstadt by calling into question the equality of timbre with other musical parameters.

On the Theory of Instrumentation

In this essay, originally published in 1985, Carl Dahlhaus addresses the problem of how to integrate timbre into our understanding of music while honoring its resistance to description and quantification. In particular, he explores the history of orchestration in terms of an opposition between “coloristic” and “structural instrumentation,” the latter defined as that which “actively intervenes in the compositional logic [Tonsatz] of the music, rather than being merely dependent on it.” Dahlhaus’ essay is grounded squarely in the common-practice era: his compositional points of reference span from Haydn to Richard Strauss, and he is particularly concerned with how instrumentation can reveal structural patterns that stand athwart the formal trajectories suggested by tonal analyses.

Timbre: Alternative Histories and Possible Futures for the Study of Music

Timbre has always been a central element of music and sound, but it is only now emerging as a central dimension in musical thought. Aided by the burgeoning fields of sound studies and critical organology, music studies are taking the “material turn” toward timbre. One of the most urgent tasks of a timbral musicology is to rethink its categories from the ground up and to make space for sound at the foundation of our thinking. This chapter offers an overview of the Handbook, presenting a variety of viewpoints on the multifaceted quality of timbre, covering its histories, philosophies, technologies, and modes of perception. It highlights explorations of timbre that have existed (but were marginalized by our collective timbral deafness) and proposes alternative paths not yet pursued.

Technology and Timbre: Features of the Changing Instrumental Soundscape of the Long Nineteenth Century (1789–1914)

Over the past four hundred years, instrument makers and performers have pursued extended range, the ability to play louder, the capacity to play more chromatic notes, and the desire for a more homogeneous tone. The technological innovations and redefinition of playing technique needed to realize these goals nearly always resulted in changes to an instrument’s timbre. Newly emerging technologies such as advanced key systems and valves accelerated this process during the Second Industrial Revolution and the timbral identity of wind instruments, brass in particular, was recast. Although often superficially understood as a linear progression, the narrative of technological developments and their adoption is a confluence of many factors in which timbre is a primary element. The use of new technologies was governed by factors including performer and listener expectations, prevailing aesthetics, national preferences, class distinctions associated with particular repertoires and groups of performers, and the socio-timbral connotations of instruments. Performers and listeners became attuned to the multifaceted timbral palette created by the simultaneous use of old and new instrumental technologies during the nineteenth century and composers used both to create highly nuanced soundscapes. The eventual replacement of these instruments by their modern successors reflected more than technological progress and served to diminish composers’ timbral intentions. Although initially the preserve of the historically informed performance movement, increased appreciation for the distinctive timbral characteristics of many superseded instruments is leading to a reappraisal of their use in the modern orchestra and as a medium for contemporary composers.

Pitch vs. Timbre

Early comparative musicology habitually ignored, even extinguished, timbre in its single-minded focus on pitch. This chapter traces the broader social, cultural, and political consequences of this framework. It surveys how, at the turn of the twentieth century, John Comfort Fillmore and Benjamin Ives Gilman followed the lead of Alice Fletcher and Alexander Ellis in deploying a broad range of technologies—phonograph, Helmholtz resonator, keyboard, and musical notation—to develop frameworks for analyzing essential similarities and differences between Native American and Western musics. It argues that such scholarship, while ostensibly aimed at salvaging Native American music, also served American efforts to reform and silence indigenous voices. The postscript examines the resonances between their theories and modern frameworks of parametric analysis that construe pitch and timbre as autonomous, and proposes that there may be unrecognized perils in overly articulating the boundaries between pitch and timbre to focus analytical attention exclusively on the measurable quantities of musical sound.

Qur’an Alphabetics and the Timbre of Recitation

This article examines the history of timbre in Qur’anic recitation, focusing on the intersection of the interior, conceptual, rule-based space of the mouth and the exterior, physical, highly variable architecture of mosques. In both cases, timbre plays a critical role in making Qur’anic recitation recognizable, even to untrained ears, and even if—especially in the case of mosques—that predominant, stereotyped setting is not necessarily representative of the tradition more broadly. The article examines the tension between Qur’an as fixed text and as recitation (qur’ān) and the challenges of reconciling these two notions of Qur’an into a definitive, unitary whole, that proved elusive in the early centuries of Islam, precisely on grounds of timbral, phonetic, and dialectal questions. At the same time, the elaborate design of rules for proper recitation has been so fully developed over the last millennium that it has become a kind of cultural technique, a rule-based algorithm that imposes on human performers a set of media-like operations. Indeed, recent computer science and engineering have fully embraced the algorithmicizing of vocality and timbre in recitation to the point of creating a number of software platforms designed to reproduce or assess the proper application of these rules. In all these different trajectories—mouth, mosque, and media—the alphabetics of the Qur’an play a central role in transducing a sacred text into the contingencies of the material world.

Complex Impression and Klangfarbe: Timbre as a Catalyst of Carl Stumpf’s Psychological Research

The philosopher-psychologist Carl Stumpf studied Klangfarbe (timbre) as an integral part of his phenomenology. He combined novel experimental and observation techniques of timbre perception on both vowels and the sound of musical instruments with conceptual and logical work at the interface of physiology, psychology, and philosophy, outlining timbre as a complex impression (Komplexeindruck). This article argues that this approach is informed by an explicitly modern scientific framework that replaced Helmholtz’s earlier spectral model with concepts of distribution and multi-dimensionality, and with spatialization, embodied in formants (main and secondary). This refinement of the conception of timbre yielded insights into the structural laws of phenomena and into mental functions.

Early Modern Voices

This chapter explores early modern conceptions of voice and vocal timbre, focusing on French and German philosophical and musical writings of the long seventeenth century. It argues that a Cartesian paradigm of representation, which has tended to underpin most present-day interpretations of the music of this period, falls short of recognizing the capacity of the early modern (musical) voice to bridge the realms of the material and immaterial, of body and soul. Such a historically situated consideration of timbre – configured here as a quality arising at the intersection of the physiological and spiritual processes that constituted the human voice – thereby offers a way towards recuperating certain off-Cartesian modes of thinking, feeling and listening.

Timbre as Harmony—Harmony as Timbre

While timbre is typically understood as a property of a single musical note or event, many contemporary musical practices depend on the combination of multiple events—each with their own pitch, dynamic, and sound color—into unified composites with their own emergent timbres. Such composites are essential for composers of spectral music such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, but also can be heard in works by composers from Arnold Schoenberg to James Tenney. Viewed from the perspective of music psychology, these composites are “chimeric” percepts, thwarting the usual parsing of sonic input into separate sources through auditory scene analysis. When timbre is redefined to include composite events, it overlaps significantly with the discipline of harmony; many musical effects—textural sound-masses, synthesized acoustic spectra, virtual ring modulation, etc.—blur the lines between timbre and harmony, opening up a hybrid space between the two domains.