IndieWeb Carnival: Tone Colors

Movement III, “Farben” (“Colors”) from Arnold Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 begins very subtly. Two different groups in the orchestra alternate on the same hushed, eerie chord. As this slow, regular pulsation continues, some notes in the chord move up or down very slightly while others remain the same, gradually transforming the harmony.

Throughout the movement, there is almost no melody in the traditional sense. Rather, by keeping the pitch material nearly static while alternating different instruments (or combinations of instruments), Schoenberg foregrounds the timbre or “tone-colors” of the orchestra — the aspects of sound by which we can tell, for example, a trumpet from a violin.

He describes what he is doing as klangfarbenmelodie or “tone-color melody.” By composing this way, he seeks to have the listener perceive this changing of “tone-colors” with “a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches.” ^[1] In other words, just as a more traditional melody might have a distinctive sequence of pitches (often associated with a similarly distinctive rhythm), we can apply the same type of listening to a sequence of timbres, as well as writing music that encourages this type of listening.

Color in My Earlier Music

In my first year of college, I stumbled across a score page for Anton Webern's Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24 discarded in a practice room — likely homework from some classmate's 20th-century music theory class. Webern was one of Schoenberg's students and someone who also made use of klangfarbenmelodie, and this piece was my entry point to that idea, among many other musical concepts. My Nonet from 2014, and movement III in particular is a good example of my use of this technique.

Where Schoenberg's prototype of klangfarbenmelodie in his “Farben” movement uses slowly morphing chords, the opening of movement III of my Nonet is highly pointillistic — more like how Webern tended to write. In the first two measures, the horn, bass clarinet, and cello each play a short motive, transposing and manipulating it each time, with each instrument just barely overlapping with the end of the previous one. This rapid passing of short ideas between instruments sets the tone for the rest of the composition.

We can listen to this pointillistic call-and-response in a similar way to how we did in the Schoenberg example. While the musical material is much more active in my piece, the shifts in tone color also occur in quicker succession, and are often accompanied by large register jumps. In addition, almost all of the material derives from that 5-note motive from the first measure. While the melody is quite dissonant, angular, and chromatic, deriving most things from this one short motive gives a consistent overall character or “vibe” to the piece.

The combination of a consistent character to the melody with large contrasts in timbre and register encourages the listener to focus on the overall quality and color of the sound, rather than trying to follow the specifics of the melody. When I listen like this, the rapid klangfarbenmelodie shifts in tone color become particularly clear.

This pointillistic approach of rapidly passing ideas between instruments appeared regularly in many other compositions of mine around this time, and as I wrote this way, I took particular interest in the shifting timbres that resulted.

Color in My Recent Composition

Some 13 years after my Nonet, it's interesting to look back on what has changed and what has stayed the same in how I use color in my music. I composed If this reaches you in 2021, and it was recorded in 2024. The details of my approach are very different, but the emphasis on sound and timbre, and the pointillistic, thin textures are still there. This piece is for MIDI keyboard (controlling a custom software setup in Max/MSP), flute, and clarinet. The flutist briefly uses a bass bow on a cardboard box in the middle, as well. The MIDI keyboard plays a combination of electric piano and sampled amateur radio sounds — I wrote about using radio transmissions in my compositions in another post.

Where the things that made the Nonet sound unusual were the choice of pitches and rhythms, in If this reaches you, the focus is a bit more on sound than pitch. In addition to the “non-musical” radio samples, I also use a number of so-called “extended techniques,” particularly in the clarinet. Clarinetist Heather Roche's blog is a great source of information on how these work, and I use various different multiphonics, double trills, and other unusual sounds. At the same time, the way I combine these sounds is still quite pointillistic, and emphasizes rapid shifts between the different kinds of noise.

When I do use clearly pitched material, my more recent compositions tend to be a bit more “tonal” than the Nonet — less chromatic, and leaning more toward “cheesy” 80s pop, lounge music, or electronic dance music sounds. For example, the piano chords — both notes and instrument sound — in If this reaches you starting at around 0:58 sound like lounge/elevator music mixed in amid the noisy samples and flute/clarinet sounds. The synth chords and scooping accents in the sax melody in the opening of Outlive everything you know sound reminiscent of house music, again mixed in with a kaleidoscope of strange glitches and multiphonics.

Someone I admire who manages to pull together “cheesy” synth sounds with experimental electronics (as well as metal and many other things!) is Fire-Toolz. Listen how the opening of Soaked: Another Name for Everything moves from acoustic guitar to 80s power ballad to glitchy sound collage, to some sort of prog-rock/elevator music hybrid at the end. Extremely colorful, and while her music is very different from Schoenberg, the quick movement between different tone colors is an integral part of her work too.

Wrapping Up

Marisabel is hosting this month's Indieweb carnival on the topic of colors, and this is my contribution. I had been looking forward to writing on this topic since I saw it on the list of upcoming events. I've been enjoying other people's entries, and thanks to Marisabel for hosting! I've particularly enjoyed this exercise of looking at my past work because it has given me some ideas for a current composition project — more info on that as I compose. Until next time!