Timbre eternal
Title: Timbre eternal
Authors: Emily Dolan, Harvard University
Conference: Timbre is a Many-Splendored Thing — Research Keynote Lecture, July 5th, 2018.
Source URL: https://www.mcgill.ca/timbre2018/program
Timbre Eternal
Emily I. Dolan
Department of Music, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Timbre studies have exploded in the twenty-first century, which is attested to by this conference and by a profusion of recent and forthcoming publications: Isabella van Elferen recently edited a special issue of Contemporary Music Review devoted to timbre; later this year, Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark will publish their volume on timbre in popular music, The Relentless Pursuit of Tone; Alexander Rehding and I are co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Timbre, which will include over twenty essays by scholars in a wide range of fields (Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Theory, Organology, Perception and Cognition, Classics, Anthropology, History of Science). The notion that timbre is a marginalized, overlooked, and understudied parameter—that commonplace opening gambit—is fast becoming untenable. What we face now is a profusion of studies, cutting across genres, methodologies, and disciplines.
Timbre everywhere
In this talk, I first reflect on the “timbral litany” in today’s scholarship: timbre has no standardized language; it lacks a systematic theory; timbre is defined negatively, and so forth. In particular, I focus on the tension between the many claims of timbre’s central important to musical experience, on the one hand, with the reality that we often, on the other hand, talk over and past timbre, abstracting music from timbre’s specificities. This tension, I argue, can ultimately be understood historically. In this talk, I use the example of Gluck, his orchestration, and its changing reception. This example is useful for several reasons: first, Gluck’s operatic reforms hinged, in part, on a particular deployment of his orchestral forces, one that demanded a particular kind of aural attention to his orchestra as a kind of emotional subtext. Without a robust vocabulary for discussing orchestral timbre and orchestration, contemporary accounts point more vaguely to the power of Gluck’s “harmony.” Not all listeners, however, could apprehend Gluck’s orchestration, and I trace those listeners who struggled as they listened. By the nineteenth century, however, Gluck’s innovations became commonplace and canonized, held up as examples of orchestral excellence. Wagner famously both celebrated Gluck as an innovator while also finding himself underwhelmed with Gluck’s music when he encountered his music in performance.
Conclusions
The story of Gluck is not isolated: the outlandish, experimental, and challenging orchestral effects of one generation often become, for the next generation, the baseline and standard. I trace what we could call the timbral cycle, whereby the very centrality of timbre leads directly to its disappearance from the mainstream of musical discourse. In addition to recovering timbre—the noble goal of so much contemporary scholarship—we might also attend to what it means to listen past timbre, and what is at stake when we let timbre go.
References
Dolan, E. & Rehding, A. (Eds.). (Forthcoming) The Oxford Handbook of Timbre. Oxford and New York. Oxford University Press.
Fink, R., Latour, M., & Wallmark, Z. (Eds.). (2018) The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music. Oxford and New York. Oxford University Press.
van Elferen, I. (Ed.). (2017) Contemporary Music Review, 36 (6).