Dissertation Index
Author: DeThorne, Jeffrey D. Title: ORCHESTRATING ELECTROACOUSTICS: ON THE AESTHETICS OF INSTRUMENTATION, ORCHESTRATION, AND ELECTRONIC MUSIC Institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison Begun: June 2006 Completed: August 2010 Abstract: When asked by a violinist why he wrote a particularly difficult violin part, Beethoven allegedly responded, “Does he believe that I think of his wretched fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?” While the violinist bemoans the neglect of his instrument’s technical abilities, Beethoven insists that the “spirit” of composition should not be hampered by any particular instrumental manifestation. Both the performer and the composer betray a certain anxiety about the significance of the instrument. This dissertation examines various cultural anxieties between two schools of instrumental sound in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first school, associated with Beethoven and German orchestral music, seeks to subordinate individual wind colors within a colorless, organ-like orchestration. For Hugo Riemann, writing at the end of the 19th century, doubling and thereby neutralizing an “objective” wind color creates a more “subjective,” string-centered sonority that carefully plasticizes the compositional structure without disturbing the transparent whole. The second school, associated with Berlioz and French romanticism, values both individual instrumental colors and diffuse orchestral sonorities in themselves. While Theodor Adorno considers Berlioz’s emancipation of instrumental color revolutionary, he nevertheless critiques the late 19th-century romantic orchestra’s dissolution of particular individual instrumental colors into a diffuse, generalized sonority. For Adorno, it was left to Alban Berg to create a genuinely dialectical “fluctuation” of particular color and diffuse sonority in the orchestration of his own Frühen Lieder (1923). If colorful French instrumentation and colorless German orchestration subtend 19th-century aesthetics of instrumental sound, 20th-century music aesthetics separate colorful noise from colorless sonority. Luigi Russolo’s “art of noises” requires noise reduction, and Pierre Schaeffer promotes the abstraction of sound from its noisy source into “musical objects.” If our current understanding aligns electronic music wholly with modernity and its putatively radical and self-conscious break with the past, this dissertation suggests that an essential underlying continuity in the French-instrumentation/German-orchestration binary persists even in the face of the decline of the musical and cultural traditions that created and sustained them. Keywords: orchestration, aesthetics, timbre, Berlioz, Riemann, Adorno, Boulez, Varese, Schaeffer TOC: Chapter 1 Colorful Instrumentation and Colorless Orchestration Plastic Instrumentation and Transparent Orchestration Post-Compositional Orchestration and Orchestration-as-Composition Colorful Instrumentation (I1) vs.Transparent Orchestration (O2) French (I1 and O1) and German (I2 and O2) Instrumentation and Orchestration Chapter 2 Riemann and the Klang of Orchestration Subjectivating a Klang and Objectivating a Farbe Riemann’s Klang and the Subjective String Orchestra Riemann’s Farbe and the Objective Romantic Orchestra The Middle Chapters: Riemann’s Orchestral Farbklang Critiquing and Preserving German Orchestration: Wagner vs. Schenker Chapter 3 Emancipating Color: Adorno and the Critique of Orchestration Kurth’s “Absolute” Instrumental Color Wellesz’s “New Instrumentation” Schoenberg’s Orchestration (O2) and Webern’s Instrumentation (I2) Adorno and the Impossibility of Orchestration Klang-Farbe “Fluctuation” in Berg’s Frühen Lieder Adorno and Orchestration-as-Composition Chapter 4 Striated Instrumentation, Smooth Orchestration, and Timbral Ionization External/Internal Composition, Chamber/Orchestral Music, and Raw/Organized Timbre Boulez’s Timbral Continuum in the Deuxième Improvisation sur Mallarmé (1958) Varèse’s Timbral Continuum: Hyperprism (1924), Ionisation (1931), and Déserts (1959) Chapter 5 Acoustic Instrumentation, Acousmatic Orchestration, and Eidetic Electroacoustics Noise-Sound in Russolo’s L’arte dei rumori (1916) Colorless Sonority in Schaeffer’s Traite des objets musicaux (1966) Critiquing Sonority and Reviving Noise Lamenting Noise Reduction: Henry’s Variations pour une porte et un soupir (1962) Noisy French Instrumentation, Sonorous German Orchestration, and New German Noise- Sounds Contact: 2411 Hoard Street, Madison, Wisconsin, 53704 jddethorne@gmail.com 608-301-0345 |