Tone cluster

A tone cluster, in music and in Western tuning, is a chord or simultaneity comprised of consecutive tones separated chromatically. For example a typical tone cluster could be the tones C, C#, D, D#, E, and F, held at the same time. Variants of this include a chord comprised of tones separated diatonically or pentatonically and played in unison (on a piano, for example, a chord created by striking a set of only black keys). Tone clusters may also be considered secundal chords.

Related Topics:
Music - Chord - Simultaneity - Tone - Chromatic - Diatonic - Pentatonic - Secundal

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While sporadic examples of clusters may be found at least as far back as 1700,{{ref|earliest}} not before the second decade of the twentieth century did tone clusters 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).{{ref|sonata}} 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.

Related Topics:
Percy Grainger - Leo Ornstein - Charles Ives - ''Concord'' Sonata

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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 technique as a significant element in Western classical music. Assumed by some to be an essentially random?or, more kindly, aleatoric?pianistic approach, Cowell explained that it was, in fact, as precise as any other compositional method:

Related Topics:
Henry Cowell - The Tides of Manaunaun - Aleatoric

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Tone clusters...on the piano 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.

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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).

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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.

Related Topics:
Béla Bartók - Aaron Copland - Forte

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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.

Related Topics:
Krzysztof Penderecki - ''Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima'' - György Ligeti - Chromatic scale - Octave - Jazz - Free jazz - Cecil Taylor - Rock and roll - Jerry Lee Lewis

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