Our Composition
Textural Music
- Inspiration: R. Murray Shafer’s Miniwanka (Moments of Water)
-Imitates water sounds
-Uses words related to water from 10 North American Indian Languages
-Graphic notation allows collaboration with composer
- Global notation for the clusters interrupted by sudden consonances
- Micropolyphony/fugue: excerpt from Entry of the Gladiators by Julius Fucik
- Percussive effects: spring drum, ribbed rhythm sticks, conversation, jingle bell, triangle, piano lid, footsteps
- Piano effects: glissandos, chromatic scales, interior resonance
- Electronic panning
Taymaz Saba, Jocelyn Molnar, Jessica De Gaust, Monica Sowinski
Composers of the 1960s
Krzysztof Penderecki
- 1956: end of Stalinism and liberation of Communism
- Threnody: for the Victims of Hiroshima (Originally 8:37) (1960)
-Considered best known piece of textural style
-Tone poem for string orchestra
-For 52 string instruments
-Modified ABA’
-Timbre delineates 5 large sections
1. High pitches clusters
2. Novel string techniques
3. Sustained tones + quarter tone clusters linked by glissandi
4. Isolated pitches + various sound effects in canon
5. Unison sound effects + clusters leading to final chord
- Had to invent new notation symbols, later adopted by other composers
Characteristics
- Sound mass is elemental building block
- Contratimbral organization: succession of timbres
-Non-pitched sounds
-Sounds of indeterminate pitch
-Percussive sounds
-Electronic/recorded sounds
- Gradual/sudden processes of change
- Cluster chords
- Glissandos
- Extended instrumental techniques
- Striking sound combinations
- Graphic notation/symbols
Origins
Composers of the 1960s
György Ligeti
- 1920s: Ultramodernist trend
-Liberation of texture with pointillism
-Ligeti's article: Webern's Melodik
-Five Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 5 No. 4
-Tone clusters in The Tides of Manaunaun
-Sound is spatial
-Liberates composition from traditional treatments
-Form is end result
-Engineer, architect, composer
-"Stochastic" processes
-Metastaseis (1953-4)
- 1956: Left Hungary for the West
- Polyphonic structures “neutralize” individual lines, intervals and rhythms
- Sense of gradual surging and receding of sound complexes
- Form is freely conceived
- Created “micropolyphony”
- Three pieces made famous from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
-Lux Aeterna (1966) - 16 solo singers and chorus
• Expands upwards and downward by adding a dense mix of pitches above and below it
-Atmosphères (1961) - almost a single cloud, drifting through different regions of colour, harmony and texture
• 56 muted strings, a selection of woodwinds and horns playing simultaneously all the chromatic notes through a five octave range
-Requiem (1963-65) Lacrimosa: resulting hazy clusters are suddenly replaced by the clear light of simple intervals
- Did not accept Penderecki’s ideas of “global notation”