Home FOR AUTHORS Slovenská hudba 2017 Slovenská hudba, Vol. 43, No 1, p.76-87

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Slovenská hudba, Vol. 43, No 1, p.76-87

Title: Formovanie hudby. Krátka úvaha o tónoch, ich organizácii a úlohe v kompozičnom procese dneška
Author: Wojciech Widłak

Abstract: Music As Speech – this title of Harnoncourt’s book tells us the basic truth about what we do composing, playing music and listening to its performance. We are communicating the others. Music work is a form of communication between people, the most universal and capacious speech, an essential element of human’s life. Being a sort of language, music has got a structure comparable to the linguistic rules, it uses some twin means. But its main mean remains sound, in previous epochs limited to pitches and their organization, later extended to sound and its properties.
The pitches’ organization may determine a contemporary music composition in several ways, as:
1) structurizing by pitches and their organization;
    here belong a.o. regular twelve-tone series, Per Nørgård’s infinity row; also my composition Chromatic Fantasy (The Son is Scrumptious) for solo harpsichord written in 2003, in which one assemblage of pitches (without fixed rhythm, order, register etc.) determines both vertical and horizontal structure of the piece composed as a set of “variations”.
2) sound and timbre as an idea that determines music composition;
    Tadeusz Wielecki’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2008) exemplifies his “technique of a composed trill” in which a single idea of trill determines several parameters of the whole piece; an extended interpretation of trill includes: repetition with variable speed; tremolandos and oscillation between numerous pitches; pulsation of sound-colors; a half-opened form of musical work.
3) the properties of sound (pitch) and instruments as a source of method of forming musical course;
    The inspiration can be drawn from specific instrument and its features, including the electroacoustic means&sources, acoustic parameters of place of performance etc. Here one more musical dimension reveals itself: depth, a kind of counterpoint to horizontal time dimension (works of Scelsi, Crumb, Grisey and spectral composers, Feldman, Górecki, also Per Nørgård's open hierarchy). Ambiguity of music perception: perception in time vs. perception in the present, moment, now, leads us towards the problem of musical form today.
4) timbre as a source of sound-color qualities (timbralism/sonorism, electroacoustic music, electronic transformations of sound).
    Here one should mention timbralism (in Poland: sonorism), focused on the new sound quality, new sounding effects that form a ‘dialog of textures’ (Ligeti, Penderecki). The trend continued and renovated now by young generation.
Today the music seems to be an answer for current needs of sensitive people, open for new experiences and feelings, for whom the commercial products are not enough. The art is always exclusive, but the need of art still exists in people and nations all over the world, as the need of communicating the others remains in a single human heart. So, the music creation forms an individual, unique answer of a single artist for what the surrounding world ‘says’. An answer expressed in a language of languages, which is music.

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Year: 2017, Volume: 43, Issue: 1 Page From: 76, Page To: 87



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