Toward a Theory of Timbre: Verbal Timbre and Musical Line in Purcell, Sessions, and Stravinsky
Robert Cogan · Perspectives of New Music · 1969
TIMBRE, of all the parameters of music, is the one least considered. It lacks not only an adequate theory, but even an inadequate one. Its obscurity is in part notational, in part analytical and in each respect historical. While every musician knows that the compositional act of fixing and notating the timbral features of a work is comparatively recent (1750 is a convenient date, as a norm), the peculiarity of timbral notation has not been recognized. Its usual notation indicates not timbres, but rather the means particularly the instrumental means used to achieve them. (This is analogous in many respects to lute and guitar notation of pitches based on instrumental finger positions. Can one imagine the problems for the theory of pitch relations if all pitch notation were based on instrumental manipulation, rather than on the resulting sounds?) Thus timbral notation not only followed centuries after pitch and rhythm notation; it has also remained one step further removed from its essential territory the nature of timbre than those other notations (however questionable and inadequate they may be). Timbral analysis is even more recent than timbral notation. The essential formulations of Helmholtz date from 1850-80. Chapters V and VI (On the Differences in the Quality of Musical Tones and the Apprehension of Qualities of Tone) of his On the Sensations of Tone have provided the basis for all subsequent theoretical consideration of timbre. These later studies have been undertaken by acousticians, engineers, linguists, physicists, and psychologists (among others); rarely, if ever, by musicians. To be done with accuracy, timbral analysis requires sophisticated technology of a kind which has existed for less than fifty years. Even the observations of Helmholtz, remarkable for their period, contain inaccuracies due to technical limitations.