Totalist Orchestration

Marvellous piece! These examples also illustrate a concomitant trend in postclassical music, parallel to the change from simpler duple/triple rhythms to simultaneous higher prime (7 against 11, say) or relatively prime (9 against 8, say) meters. Namely, a change in the orchestration of western music from sustained harmonic series timbres with relatively slow or moderate attack times (strings, voices, woodwinds) to percussive instruments with inharmonic timbres and extremely rapid attack times: in this case, pencil sharpeners, window shutters, plucked wooden rulers, wooden boxes, mousetraps, and fishing reels.

Indeed, much totalist (metametric) music tends to employ a wealth of percussive timbres not found in the typical Euro/North American classical orchestral ensemble. A glance at the music of Michael Gordon or Louis Andriessen suffices to show the trend. One obvious reason for using percussive timbres? To acid-etch metametric rhythms into the listener's ear. But inharmonic percussive timbres also serves the secondary function of bending western rules of harmony, since inharmonic percussive timbres fail to generate the euphony we expect from major or minor triads.

As the instrumentation of post-classical music moves from harmonic-series sustained timbres to inharmonic percussive sound-colours, we exit the demesne of Euro/North American art music and enter the realm of non-Western music. This has melodic and harmonic as well as rhythmic implications, for outside of India and Europe/North America, no other indigenous musical culture on earth uses tertian triadic harmonic progressions or 12 roughly equal pitch divisions of the octave. (For convenience let us lump Iceland in with Europe/North America, whilst recognizing that Icelandic pitch-systems characteristically employ distinctly non-western neutral seconds of roughly 150 cents http://shoko.calarts.edu/KVAEDASKAPUS/.main.html just as Chinese music characteristically uses non-western neutral thirds of roughly 350 cents as well as non-Western 150-cent neutral seconds http://www.shayda.net/barbad.html ) And the use of non-western pitch systems likely relates to the prevalence of inharmonic timbres in non-western music, as William Sethares has noted in Timbre, Tuning, Spectrum, Scale, Springer-Verlag, 1994.

Thus, metametric (totalist) music represents not only a gateway to non-western rhythms but also to non-western musical timbres and non-western tunings. Parenthetically, "Non-Western" is shorthand here for "outside traditional common practice period European/North American pitch and rhythmic paradigms from roughly 1490 with the introduction of meantone to roughly 1929-1931 with the advent of Varese's Ionisation, the first Western composition orchestrated entirely for percussion instruments."

This may also help explain why the uptown New York Lincoln Center crowd continues its futile effort to deny the legitimacy of totalist/metametric music. Once the Pandora's box of non-Western pitch systems gets yanked open by contemporary western composers, the entire classical European art music scene starts to look like some soccer hoolies all jammed into one very crowded council housing flat in the midst of a vastly larger city named "World Music."

Great commentary, Jean! Your thoughts definitely make me want to know more about you and your music - any links or direction you'd care to share?

And thanks, Kyle, for shining your light on all these otherwise neglected areas of art that has actually occurred.

Cheers,
Jon