The Resonator as a Model for Musical Textures in the Context of Instrumental Contemporary Composition

Abstract

The instrumental writing practice in the 20th and 21st Centuries brings the emergence of new musical textures not observed in prior historical periods. If monophony, polyphony, homophony and heterophony have their roots in the development of traditional techniques of harmony and counterpoint, the renewal of musical texture can be understood as a result of novel musical poetics and aesthetical approaches pursued by different branches of musical modernism and their unfoldings. Concepts like emancipation of dissonance, melody of timbres (Klangfarbenmelodien), liberation of noise and the interest in moving sound masses can be traced as the catalysts of never before heard textures, like the pontillism in Anton Webern and the post-war serialists, the sound blocks of Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis’s stochastic sound masses, Krzysztof Penderecki’s massive clusters, György Ligeti’s micropolyphony and the ideal of instrumental sound synthesis pursued by Tristan Murail and other composers that are commonly put under the umbrella of Spectral Music. Even if not a leading tendency, one particularly interesting new texture is what we can call a resonator-like texture, which will be the central idea of the present article. This expanded abstract will develop a brief definition of the exciter-resonator model in the context of digital sound synthesis its possible translation in the analysis and creation of instrumental textures, exploring examples of contemporary musical repertoire, with a special interest in the work of Brazilian composers.