Penderecki's Phantom Bell

Title: Penderecki's Phantom Bell
Authors: Chelsea Komschlies(McGill University)
Conference: American Musicological Society, 2021
Source URL: YouTube

Abstract

One of the most curious aspects of timbre and its manifestation through orchestration is its ability to create what is known as a timbral emergence: the synthesis of a new timbre whose component instruments are unidentifiable as themselves. Sometimes timbral emergences can go so far as to create illusions of phantom sounding bodies which aren't present in the ensemble. Penderecki has created a fascinating aural illusion in the fourth movement of his massive, powerful oratorio for Orthodox Easter Eve, _Utrenja, Part I: The Entombment of Christ_. In the opening seconds we hear the unmistakable sound of the resonance of a great dystonic cathedral bell. However, a look at the score tells us that there is no bell present at this moment. I will give an in-depth look at bell acoustics using Hibbert, Taherzadeh, and Sharp's work in bell pitch perception (2017 p. 55, 62) and show how Penderecki's timbral illusion not only models a bell, but a giant, imaginary Russian-style cathedral bell, as opposed to a European bell. Experiments in perception of inharmonic spectra suggest that it is neither general inharmonicity nor the prominent minor third at the bottom of a spectrum that qualify a bell-like timbre in people's minds, but rather harmonic series that have either been compressed or stretched by a certain amount (Cohen 1979; Slaymaker 1970). Penderecki's fifteen-note chord contains the pitches present in bell spectra and also shows a similar degree of stretch of the harmonic series when compared to a large Russian cathedral bell, which tend to be much heavier and thicker than their European counterparts and whose harmonic spectra exhibit greater factors of stretch or compression when compared to the harmonic series. I suggest that this is an effect which Penderecki created intentionally, given his desire to capture the essence of the ancient slavic Easter Eve rite, and his precompositional travels to old monasteries in Russian and Eastern Europe in order to find examples of the tradition that had been unadulterated by modern liturgical reforms (Schwinger 1989 p. 217-24).