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Color and Density ___________________How Schoenberg’s Concept of Klangfarbenmelodie Relates toSound-Mass Music of the Mid-Twentieth Century
At the end of his celebrated book on harmony, Arnold Schoenberg gave the world
a glimpse of a future music. He called attention to the fact that up until that time music
was constructed only according to pitch, and that tone color was, structurally, all but
neglected. He disagreed with the common conception that pitch and tone color were
independent parameters of sound since “the tone becomes perceptible by virtue of tone
color.”1 Schoenberg wondered what music would be like if it had a logical system
operating in regard to the progression of its tone color.
Indeed, the world wondered with him. Since the time he wrote about it, this idea
of klangfarbenmelodie (tone-color-melody) has been the subject of inquiry, discussion
and not a few arguments. In his article, “Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie: A Principal
of Early Atonal Harmony,” Alfred Cramer cites an argument made by Schoenberg
against the claim that certain Webern compositions were a fulfillment of his concept.2
These works were considered so because of their varying of instrumentation and relative
stasis of pitch. Cramer also notes a discussion between two scholars, Erich Doflein and
Carl Dahlhaus (along with others), who argued over whether to consider the third piece
of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces an example of klangfarbenmelodie.3 Today there
is still disagreement among scholars as to what the word actually means. But all of it is
1 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), 421-2.2 Alfred Cramer, “Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie: A Principle of Early Atonal Harmony,” Music
Theory Spectrum: The Journal of the Society for Music Theory 24, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 4.3 Cramer, 3.
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only a quiet murmur, because in the end, Schoenberg’s concept of twelve-tone
composition was what truly lived on, changing the face of Western music.
To find the connection to sound mass, it will help to briefly track a portion of
twelve-tone’s influence on Western music. First, Webern used the system by breaking
the row into small three- or four-note segments, which was the first sign of micro-
structuring and formal music. The serialists of the Darmstadt school, moving in the same
direction as Webern, took the row and applied its twelve steps to aspects of rhythm,
dynamics and articulation, creating dense and mathematically complex textures. Yet, the
intricate structures, though well-thought-out and elegant, were nearly imperceptible to the
listener. This led composers of the mid-1950s and early-1960s to react against total
serialism. They began looking for other ways of structuring music, believing that the
Darmstadt school had taken pitch-related structure to its absolute limit.
At that time, electronic music studios were opening across Europe; composers
lined up to get the chance to work in them for a short time. There, they were able to
create music from the ground up, starting with elementary wave forms and creating
whatever their imaginations could devise. This new development in music opened up
their minds to think about sound according to its physical attributes: frequency,
amplitude, envelope, duration. Edgard Varèse should be mentioned here, being one
pioneer who had been thinking on this level since the 1930s. He had also been made
aware by his experience with electronic music; now, modern music was catching up with
him. It was not long before some composers began to take these new concepts and apply
them to the traditional orchestra.
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structured according to tone color and not according to pitch. In this way, composers
reacting against serialism, which was the eventual result of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone
method, unwittingly created music that began to fulfill his other influential concept, that
of klangfarbenmelodie. To see this more clearly, we will examine Schoenberg’s concept
and see how it relates to the breakthrough compositions of Xenakis and Penderecki.
To begin with, it is important to understand what Schoenberg meant by the term
klangfarbenmelodie. The idea is first discussed in the last chapter of Schoenberg’s text,
Harmonielehre.5 In this chapter, he had been discussing chords of six or more tones.
Chords of such density were fairly new to music, and Schoenberg was pointing out that
their overall color changes substantially when the voicing is changed or a single note is
added or removed. This is because the color is dependent on where the notes are in
relation to each other so that changing the voicing or inclusion of even one note affects
several sets of interval relations.
After this discussion he moves on to what he calls “yet another idea,” and begins to
build a description of klangfarbenmelodie. He does not, however, truly leave behind the
previous topic. He begins with an explanation of how sound is made up of pitch, tone
color and volume, and makes the statement that all music up to that point had only been
measured according to pitch. Meanwhile, tone color was treated as a secondary element
while in fact it is an equally, if not more important member. (He only mentions volume
in the initial description of sound; the rest of the discussion deals only with pitch and tone
color. This is surely because he does not consider volume as fundamental as the other
two elements.)
5 Schoenberg, 421.
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Schoenberg states that the evaluation of tone color is in a “much less cultivated,
much less organized state than is the aesthetic evaluation of these last-named harmonies,”
referring, it would seem, to the previous discussion on chords. He continues,
Nevertheless, we go right on boldly connecting the sounds with one another,
contrasting them with one another, simply by feeling; and it has never yet
occurred to anyone to require here of a theory that it should determine laws by
which one may do that sort of thing. Such just cannot be done at present.6
In these two sentences, Schoenberg seems to be referring directly to the tone colors
produced by the harmonies of the previous discussion, and the concept of a structure to
tone color seems to be simply a law of governing how their colors progress from one
chord and one voicing to the next. He states it even more clearly at the end of the
paragraph:
. . . but we do write progressions of tone colors without a worry, and they do
somehow satisfy the sense of beauty. What system underlies these
progressions?7
From just these excerpts it is hard to imagine how the concept of
klangfarbenmelodie became that of unchanging pitches which develop through the use of
varying instrumentation. However, this view can be seen in no less conspicuous a
publication as The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Julian Rushton’s
entry on this term in the second edition states that by klangfarbenmelodie, Schoenberg
“implied that the timbral transformation of a single pitch could be perceived as equivalent
to a melodic succession.”8 While this conclusion misses the point of Schoenberg’s
6 Ibid.7 Ibid.8 Julian Rushton, “Klangfarbenmelodie,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed.,
ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (New York: Grove Dictionaries, 2001), 13: 652.
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discussion, it is not difficult to see how it has been reached when the remainder of the
discussion is taken into account.
In the following paragraph in Harmonielehre, Schoenberg attempts to break down
his concept of musical sound, saying that “tone color is . . . the main topic, pitch a
subdivision,” or, more clearly, “Pitch is nothing else but tone color measured in one
direction.”9 These first statements make the remainder of the paragraph misleading
because he is now talking about a single tone, whereas before he was talking about
chords. Considering the initial discussion, it is clear that this change was intended to
illustrate his concept of sound by isolating the discussion to that of the construction of a
single tone. He continues, under this pretext, to talk about how melodies are “patterns”
of tone colors differentiated by pitch, then making the statement that similar patterns
could be devised according to true tone color, instead. Thus, the major description of
klangfarbenmelodie occurs in this misleading context. To further the confusion, he
defines these “patterns” of tone color as “melodies”. This presents an image of a single
tone progressing according to its timbre rather than its pitch.
He does, however, define his use of the term “melody” immediately after stating
it. Under this definition, a melody is a “[progression] whose coherence evokes an effect
analogous to thought processes.”10 He connects this definition to the idea of tone-color-
melodies by saying it would be possible to make “progressions whose relations with one
another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the
melody of pitches.”11 In these statements it becomes clear that he is not referring
9 Schoenberg, 421.10 Ibid.11 Ibid.
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specifically to single pitches or varying instrumentation, but simply to a logical system of
structuring tone color.
In the previously cited article, Cramer makes the argument that Schoenberg’s
definition of klangfarbenmelodie was that of a “progression of chords of varied formation
not necessarily grounded in the harmonic series,”12 referring to the fact that, at the time,
chord tones were considered “reified partial tones” of the harmonic series. Instead of
using the harmonic series to structure chords, Schoenberg’s idea suggests using the colors
of the chords to decide their pitch content.13
As previously mentioned, Cramer cites a letter from Schoenberg to Josef Rufer
which both clarifies Schoenberg’s position on this definition and presents musical
examples that bring this idea closer to sound mass music. In response to claims about
Webern’s music fulfilling klangfarbenmelodie, Schoenberg argues that the composer’s
works are only slightly similar to his concept, and points out several places in his own
work as isolated examples of what he meant by the word Klänge. They are “the tomb
scene of Pelleas und Melisande, or much of the introduction to the fourth movement of
my second String Quartet, or the figure from the second Piano Piece that Busoni repeated
so many times in his adaptation, and many others.” He adds, “They are never merely
individual tones of different instrumentations at different times, but rather combinations
of moving voices.” He does not say that these examples are in themselves
klangfarbenmelodien, but that “They would become melodies if one found the point of
view to arrange them so that they would form a constructive unity of absolute autonomy,
an organization that connected them according to their intrinsic values.” 14
12 Cramer, 2.13 Ibid., 1-2.14 Ibid., 4.
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problems he saw in the serialist music of his time. In his article, The Crisis of Serial
Music, Xenakis articulates these problems in six points, saying that such music:
1. Concentrates chiefly on frequency, intensity and timbre. [Notice, these are
the same three elements Schoenberg pointed out.]
2. Frequency dominates the other components which only intervene secondarily
and arbitrarily.
3. Duration is still less organized and only appears in traditional form.
4. The effort of organization rests uniquely on the frequencies and translates
itself by a linear arrangement of 12 tones.
5. With the exclusion of harmonic control the linear polyphony of the
Renaissance constitutes the frame upon which form is elaborated. The form, in thelast analysis, is only the ensemble of multilinear ‘manipulations’ of the fundamental
series.
6. The quantitative and geometric side present in all music becomes
preponderant with the school in Vienna.17
In summary, the serialist school was applying seemingly arbitrary structures to
musical parameters in an effort to follow the twelve-tone method to a logical conclusion.
In fact, their conclusion was illogical since, by quantizing musical elements to a tone row
or set, they ignored the continuous nature of those elements and elevated pitch to a
dominance that was more total than before Schoenberg. Also, they did not deal with the
real problem presented, namely, how to develop a system of moving all musical
parameters organically, without one presiding over the others. In Bálint Varga’s
published interview, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, the composer says that those in
the Darmstadt school, in attempting to address this issue, were dealing with mass events
and did not know it. He comments that they should have begun to think of “average
17 Quoted in Matossian, 85.
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density, average duration, colours and so on,” noting that these ideas would inevitably
lead to the introduction of probability mathematics in structuring music, or what he
would eventually term stochastic music.18 While Xenakis’ response to these problems
was the statistical approach, it is not this that makes his music close to
klangfarbenmelodie. Rather, it will be seen that his fundamental conception of music,
which led him to stochasticism, deals more with the development of densities, which are
perceived as color, than the development of pitches.
In Varga’s interview, Xenakis states that he first started working with
probabilities outright in his 1955-6 composition Pithoprakta. In fact, it was during work
on Metastasis that he was first made aware of the existence and function of probability
theory. Therefore, Metastasis is not a prime example of his statistical modeling in music.
It is, however, a good example of how the composer intuitively conceived of music
before a system presented itself, and how that conception relates to Schoenberg’s idea. It
was in this piece that Xenakis first dealt with the problems of his age, first employed
glissandi to create continuity, and first divided the orchestra down to its discrete
members. In addition, the premiere of this piece at the 1955 Donaueschingen Festival
was the first exposure the world had to sound mass music.
The piece has an overall structure reminiscent of ABA. In Conversations,
Xenakis admits that this was only because he wanted to end it quickly to pursue
stochasticism, so he just wrote a closing section to mirror the first. The opening
measures of the first section are reproduced in Example 2 above. Each of the two A
sections can be characterized as a single chord cluster; in the first it fans out from one
note to forty-six, and in the ending a different cluster, similarly dense, closes back to a
18 Bálint András Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1996), p.54.
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single note. Each section lasts a substantial length of time so that the listener is affected
by a sense of stasis and slow continuous movement. In Figure 1 below, a chart of the
path of the glissandi in the closing section is reproduced, giving a clearer representation
of the overall shape of the section.
These cluster chords are the first element of this music that relates to
klangfarbenmelodie. This is directly linked to their density, as every member of the
string sections plays a different pitch from the other. Just as Schoenberg’s atonaliy and
twelve-tone system treated each note with equal emphasis over time, these expansive
clusters place all twelve notes, plus many microtones (since the stings glissando from one
pitch to the next), within one event in time. This technique effectively obscures the
distinction of any one pitch from any other. The impact of the sound on the listener is
almost completely that of color. It is likely because of the impression of these two
sections that one reviewer at the time of the premier, as previously mentioned,
immediately linked it with klangfarbenmelodie.
In between the two cluster sections is one that deals with a pointillistic texture,
which makes it closer to the music of the serialist school than the other two. Despite the
obscuring of pitch, Xenakis notes in Conversations that he did employ computations in
structuring pitch relations in this piece. As this section begins, these structures become
apparent, since the line is melodic and the texture is reduced to only a few solo players.
Soon, however, each member of the orchestra is added and the sound slowly changes into
a mass. This motion from one instrument to fifty-seven might be similar to hearing one
conversation in a crowded hall, and then slowly moving up above the crowd as all
conversations become one sound. He then moves the mass by shifting the density of
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sound from section to section, presenting many of these changes in harsh juxtaposition.
In all of it, the element that the listener follows most easily is the timbre.
There are two other points about this piece that connect it to klangfarbenmelodie.
The first is noted by Nouritza Matossian in her book, Xenakis.19 Here she informs the
reader that Xenakis designed “timbral characters” for this composition which he called
“personages”. These include particular techniques and orchestrations, such as individual
and cascading glissandi, pizzicato, disordered brass, solo instrumental lines, internal
movement of percussion and others. To explain their use, Matossian compares these
“personnages” to geometric shapes, such as the square. Many different kinds of squares
can be created merely by changing the color of the square, the material it is made of, and
so on. Xenakis used these characters as generic figures which would be altered according
to pitch, dynamics, duration and other sound qualities to present, as it were, a certain
genus of sound that was also specified by its species. In addition, Matossian points out
the fact that Xenakis graphically mapped the timbral characters as they progressed and
created a detailed color visual representation of the piece. This is a technique that he
continued to use later in his career.
In connection with this idea is the second point, which comes from a quotation
from Varba’s Conversations.20 In talking about Metastasis, Xenakis tells of two things
that were occupying his mind at the time of writing the piece. The first was the idea of
writing a dodecaphonic work that was intimately connected to some mathematical
computation, which would be most fulfilled by his later use of probability theory. The
second point, however, speaks directly to the last chapter of Harmonielehre. Without
19 Matossian, 60-61.20 Varba, 72.
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mentioning Schoenberg, Xenakis notes the phenomenon previously discussed, in which a
chord of six or more pitches has a particular color that is substantially altered by even
small changes to the notes. Xenakis says that, at the time, he was occupied with the idea
of writing a continuous progression from one of these distinct sonorities to another,
without any gap in between. Here we see that alongside his mathematical ponderings
was an awareness of timbre and a desire to write music that was structured around its
development over time. His treatment of the above mentioned “personages” shows some
of the results of his thinking.
However, although it is clear that Xenakis paid attention to the progression of
colors, it is also clear that his music is primarily structured according to the movement of
densities of sound, not the evolution of colors. The result, however, is music that is
removed completely from reliance on pitch-related structures, and instead deals with the
movement of masses of sound over time. Since these masses effectively obscure the
function of individual pitches and bring timbre to the fore, the effect is that the listener
perceives a structure reliant upon changing timbre. This is even true in the middle
section because of the eventual total obscuring of pitch. In effect, Xenakis is writing
klangfarbenmelodie music, but his true structure is based on density rather than color.
In 1960, six years after the completion of Metastasis, Poland produced another
sound mass composer. In 1956, the same year that Xenakis was beginning work on
Pithoprakta, Poland was coming out of seven years of isolation from the stage of modern
music. In this year, the people staged a revolt, which resulted in, among other things, a
loosening of restrictions on music by the ruling Soviet-controlled government. While
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While sonorism is linked with most of the Polish composers from this time,
Krzyzstof Penderecki is considered the figurehead for the period. Around the year 1960,
he produced four pieces which were the first of his own to break completely with
traditional forms and are considered the first sonoristic compositions. They are,
Dimensions of Time and Silence, Anaklasis, Threnody: to the Victims of Hiroshima, and
his String Quartet . The first two were performed in that same year. Of these
performances, Anaklasis is particularly of note because it was the first of Penderecki’s
works to be performed on an international stage outside of Poland, being commissioned
for the 1960 Donaueschinger Festival in Germany. It is evidence to the power of this
new kind of music that he received an encore from the audience, something that was far
more common in the nineteenth-century and almost unheard of in the twentieth. The
success of this performance was pivotal in making Penderecki the important figure he is
today. Interestingly, it was on the same stage five years previous that Metastasis had the
same effect for Xenakis.
Penderecki is not as forthcoming in detailed explanations of his compositional
techniques as is Xenakis. Therefore, determining the structure of his work from this
period has been the daunting task of theorists ever since the style came to prominence.
One of the first theorists to attempt an explanation was Tadeusz Zielinski, who wrote on
the subject throughout the 1960s. One of the lasting contributions of these writings is the
notion of the “sound shape” which he considers an elementary unit of construction in
Penderecki’s works. He also talks of three basic types of sound, the discussion of which
will help to define the former term. These three types are lines, or a single pitch held for
various durations; bands, or many pitches forming a cluster that is held for various
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One thing Penderecki is often noted for is his creation of many new sound effects
by employing unconventional ways of sounding the instruments. Slapping the strings on
the fingerboard with the palm of the hand is one example. The timbre system deals with
the development of these timbres, as well as traditional timbres, throughout the piece.25
Despite its name, this system is not the one most related to the idea of klangfarben-
melodie. Instead, the basic system is, because it shows that there is an order to the sound
shapes created and moved within Penderecki’s pieces, which in turn shows a logical
structure based on density. Density, in turn, is perceived not as pitch, but color.
For example, in measure 3 of Anaklasis, as seen in Example 4 below, the strings
have a progression which starts from a thick band in the middle register, moves to a
thinner band in an extreme high register which oscillates its pitch within the vertical
space by way of a wide vibrato, and ends with a still thinner band in a higher register,
which oscillates at a slower rate. In addition, there is a progression in the length and
placement of each shape. The first is about one half the length of the second, the second
about one half the length of the third, and the last two overlap while the first two do not.
This is a clear structure according to the sound shapes’ motion within the different
parameters of the musical space. On a larger scale, the piece begins with sustained
sounds, progresses to less sustained sounds, becomes pointillistic, and eventually returns
in the other direction.
Clearly, the piece is not ordered by interval relations, but rather by the density of
sound within time and space and how that density changes. In this way Penderecki’s
25 Mirka, 239-40.
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music is quite similar to that of Xenakis. The same conclusion can then be reached – that
the listener understands a structure in the piece according to the changing of timbre. The
difference of Penderecki’s music is that he uses sound shapes more distinctly than
Xenakis, who concentrates his efforts on overall larger masses, although his music
certainly employs similar shapes. This aspect makes Penderecki’s work arguably more
accessible because the sound shapes are heard as units that interact over time, or objects
of development, which are more tangible than the sound fields more common in the
music of Xenakis.
While it has been shown how the work of these two composers relates to
klangfarbenmelodie, it has not yet been mentioned how this relates to the whole of sound
mass music. Within these works, the characteristic elements of sound mass are clearly
displayed. These elements are as follows: the use of dense clusters which obscure the
presence of pitch and bring timbre to the fore, sound shapes which present themselves as
a tangible musical unit, but have no defined pitch, thus making themselves units of
timbre, and formal construction which is based on the development of such shapes and,
more broadly, the varying density of sound in time and musical space, which results in
varying color. These elements also appear in the work of Ligeti, Lutoslawski and others.
They are the elements which make this music, while being approached from such unique
angles, so similar that they should fall under the same label. These composers, while
aware of Schoenberg’s idea, did not set out to fulfill it. Rather, by the re-conception of
music that was the result of electronic music technologies, they succeeded in creating
music that addresses sound apart from its pitch or rhythm, developing a new language
that is ultimately based on colors.
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However, it is also important to point out that, although sound-mass is based upon
colors, it does not completely fulfill Schoenberg’s idea, since it does not present a law
governing the progression of sonorities based on their timbre. The musical examples
shown here have dealt in the near total obscuring of pitch, while Schoenberg’s idea
referred to a law structuring harmonic progressions, which would thus take pitch and
interval relations into account. In this way, sound mass might be seen as a heavy-handed,
or particularly intense realization of Schoenberg’s concept. Also, because the music
world in the twentieth-century has adopted a pervasive emphasis on individuality and
non-conformity among composers, it is possibly unlikely that anyone would propose
anymore to develop a new law by which composers could move from one chord to
another.
Yet, Schoenberg was truly suggesting that just as pitches in a melody create a
certain effect in the listener because of their acoustical properties, so complex sonorities
must have an underlying law that governs the affect they have on the listener. While we
certainly understand consonance and dissonance, there has not yet been the unveiling of
any natural law that might explain the dynamics involved in the complex structuring of
chords. Sound-mass has provided an idiom in which colors progress according to a logic
free of the tethers of pitch structures. Maybe a future law that would provide composers
with further codification of the dynamics of complex sonorities is still to come.
Works Consulted
Books, Articles, Scores
Cramer, Alfred. “Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie: A Principle of Early AtonalHarmony.” Music Theory Spectrum: The Journal of the Society for Music Theory
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24, no.1 (Spring 2002): 1-34.
Jacobson, Bernard. A Polish Renaissance. London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1996.
Ligeti, Gyorgy. Apparitions. 2nd Rev. ed. New York: Universal Edition, 1971.
Ligeti, György, Péter Várnai, Josef Hausler and Claude Samuel. György Ligeti: In
Conversation. London: Eulenburg Books, 1983.
Matossian, Nouritza. Xenakis. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1986.
Mirka, Danuta. The Sonoristic structuralism of Krzysztof Penderecki. Katowice, Poland:
Music Academy, 1997.
Penderecki, Krzysztof. Anaklasis: for Strings and Percussion Groups. Celle, Germany:
Moeck Verlag, 1960.
Rappoport-Gelfand, Lidia. Musical Life in Poland: The Postwar Years 1945 – 1977. New
York: Gordon and Breach, 1991.
Rushton, Julian. “Klangfarbenmelodie.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. Edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 13: 652. New York:
Grove Dictionaries, 2001.
Schoenberg, Arnold. Theory of Harmony. Translated by Roy E. Carter. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983.
Steinitz, Richard. György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination. Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 2003.
Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: University Press, 2005.
Varga, Bálint András. Conversations with Iannis Xenakis. London: Faber and Faber
Ltd., 1996.
Xenakis, Iannis. Metastaseis B. New York: Boosey and Hawkes Ltd., 1967.
Recordings
Penderecki, Krzysztof. Matrix 5. The Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra and
The London Symphony Orchestra. Krzysztof Penderecki, cond. EMI 7243 5
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65077 2 2.
Xenakis, Iannis. Metastasis. The Orchestre National De L’O.R.T.F. Maurice Le Roux,
cond. Le Chant Du Monde LDC 278 368
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k k k k k
k k k k k
Example 2: Opening Cluster Progressing from One Note in Xenakis’ Metastasis.
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Figure 1: Chart of Glissandi Path in the Cluster Chord at the End of Metastasis.
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Example 3: Sound Shapes in Penderecki’s Anaklasis.
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Example 4: Sound Shapes Showing a Progression of Densities in Anaklasis.