Chord as cloud, harmony as spirit
In recent years, my main interest as a composer and performer has been to explore how and in what ways a piece of music can transcend mere pitches in order to evoke the inner life of our being through its musical morphology, structural relations, and formal design. As a composer, I continue to imagine musical objects that could be realized in a rather intangible or ethereal way, almost reflecting the structure of our very soul. This article gives a brief summary of my current explorations of sound structures, musical harmony, and spirituality in music, as well as some indications of their conceptual and perceptual interdependence.
A very known element of musical vocabulary – the chord, is often represented by sustained pitches that fuse into a solid block, and whose musical development can result in the addition or subtraction of individual tones from the evolving pitch aggregation. The result is some sort of a cloud-like texture or sound mass. In this notion of ‘harmonic clouds’, the statistical clouds of individual tones (i.e., pitches) often act as sonic particles or micro-events, and in turn ask for some sort of statistical processes in which the set of elements used in the texture is kept constant or evolving. Other well-known attributes of cloud textures are: density (number of events within a given time period; sparse scatterings/dense scintillations); statistical evolution with specific morphologies: amplitude (crescendi/decrescendi); internal tempo (accelerando/rallentando); density (transparency of the material: increasing/decreasing; disintegration/coalescence); harmonicity (pitch/chord/cluster/noise); spectrum (high/mid/low). (Roads, 2001)
The notion of harmony as what I would call a spiritual extension of sonic resonance has been a concern of music composition from the early days of the twentieth-century. A number of composers and theorists attempted to describe and classify the compositional morphology and structural processes affecting the “approach to sound materials and musical structures which concentrates on the spectrum of available pitches and their shaping in time.” (Smalley, 1986) For a detailed overview of what seems to be a fascinating insight to both electronic and acoustic modes of composition that is “based entirely on the way sound-objects have, inherent within their perceptual qualities, the potential for building gestures, shapes and forms”, please consult Smalley’s article. While inspired by the concepts from electroacoustic music (this very brief overview of musical constituents and structures, or spectro-morphological materials and techniques is drawn from the domain of electro-acoustic music and timbre perception), this compositional approach can be applied to conventional musical instruments as well. As a result, the manipulation of acoustical instruments is best seen in forming musical gestures, with “the spectral shapes and shape-sequences created by the energy of physical and vocal articulation.” (Ibid.) In turn, these spectral shapes and processes resemble the above-mentioned cloud taxonomy and transformation.
Spectral typology refers to how pitches are combined to form different sound types; the formation of spectral types into various temporal patterns is then understood in terms of spectral morphology. The theoretical framework of spectral typology can be broken into three main categories: note (note proper, harmonic spectrum, inharmonic spectrum), node, noise. As Smalley illustrates, each in turn leads to spectral morphologies, interplay of motion and time, and a number of structural processes encompassing gestures and textures, structural functions and relationships.
These various techniques for organizing harmonic and rhythmic material have shown themselves to be a potent source of musical ideas, both in composition and analysis. I hope to continue exploring these concepts, especially in my future articles and compositions. It seems to me that resonance with its notion of spectro-morphology offers a mystical resemblance to clouds of our inner self. It ranges from being almost invisible or transparent to very present or opaque. Metaphorically represented in sound, it becomes an extenstion of our very human existence. One of my recent works, a piano piece …of the lake in its own way illustrates a desire for this reciprocity of clouds and resonance-like harmonies.
In his recent book entitled “The Reinvention of Religious Music”, Sander Van Maas juxtaposes spectrality with spirituality. The comparison is rooted in his analysis and description of the effects of dazzlement in Messiaen’s music, a phenomenon often achieved by the complex manipulation of pitch and timbral combinations. “These are the complex, sometimes saturated timbres that Messiaen ascribes ‘a certain mystery’ to and which he uses for evoking the strange and miraculous [,...]” (Vas Mass, 2009). It is perhaps this, at first unfathomable nature of musical harmony, that is mirrored in the “natural resonance of sonorous bodies” and reflected in a unique experience of the invisible but living spirit (Messiaen, 1977). As Messiaen states again,
“To hear the sounds of the invisible on the earth is an extraordinary joy, a kind of knowledge of the beyond through music — And what a marvelous opportunity for composer! But a dangerous opportunity, for the music definitely must be quite beautiful.” (Messiaen, 1994).
The impetus for this reflection on composition, harmony, and spirituality was to question if one could understand the concept of sound-resonance in the same way we apprehend the body-soul problem. Could this musical resonance be compared then to a spiritual resonance, or even as some ethereal cloud-like objects, being only able to reveal itself in a form of the invisible sound vibrations? Is it possible, at least in our human language of music to express those ineffable and still beyond words concepts and sentiments of the inner self and its relation to the divine? I do not know if I could successfully answer this, or even more, draw a fine line between these concepts. What I know for certain is that it is inspiring to look for harmony in music that reverberates with the spirit of our existence. “Resonance alone does not suffice, however. The composer will have to (and want to) deploy this phenomenon” (Van Mass, 2009).
