Account for contemporary techniques, including extended instrumental and vocal techniques, electronic and electroacoustic sound, indeterminacy, and the absorption of jazz into concert music

What this dot point is asking

SEAB wants you to account for the broad family of contemporary techniques by which twentieth-century and later composers expanded the materials of music beyond pitch and harmony. The central insight is that the century progressively treated sound itself, its timbre, source, density and even its degree of fixity, as compositional material. Your task is to name the main techniques across four areas (extended instrumental and vocal technique, electronics, indeterminacy, and the jazz influence) and explain how each widens the resources beyond the traditional note.

The answer

The musical concept: sound itself as material

The unifying idea is that colour, texture and the nature of the sound source become primary, alongside or instead of pitch and chord. Several devices follow from this:

• Tone clusters: dense blocks of adjacent notes sounded together, heard as a band of sound rather than a chord.
• Sound mass: a texture in which individual pitches merge into a thick, evolving cloud, so density and register, not melody and harmony, organise the music.

The technique: extended instrumental and vocal techniques

Composers draw new colours from familiar instruments and voices:

• Strings: sul ponticello (bowing near the bridge for a glassy tone), col legno (striking the string with the wood of the bow), harmonics, and percussive body taps.
• Winds: flutter-tonguing, key clicks, and multiphonics (sounding more than one pitch at once).
• Piano: the prepared piano, in which objects are placed on or between the strings to alter the timbre, turning the piano into a percussion ensemble.
• Voice: Sprechstimme (a notated speech-song between speaking and singing), whispering, and other vocal effects.

The technique: electronic and electroacoustic sound

Technology brings non-instrumental sound into the work:

• Musique concrete: recorded real-world (concrete) sounds cut, looped, sped up, slowed and layered, originally on tape.
• Electronic synthesis: sounds generated electronically rather than recorded.
• Electroacoustic music: live performers combined with tape or with live electronic processing.

Indeterminacy and the jazz influence

• Indeterminacy (chance, aleatoric music): procedures in which some aspect of the music, the order of events, the exact pitches or durations, is left to chance or to performer choice, so no two performances are alike.
• Jazz influence: the syncopation and swing, blue notes, extended jazz chords and improvisatory feel of jazz were absorbed into concert music, refreshing it with a vernacular, rhythmically vital language.

Examples in context

Example 1. John Cage, prepared piano and indeterminacy. Cage placed objects on the piano strings to create a one-player percussion ensemble (the prepared piano) and pioneered chance procedures and open scores in which performers or random methods determine aspects of the music. His work is the clearest demonstration of sound and indeterminacy as compositional material.

Example 2. George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, jazz in concert music. Gershwin fused jazz rhythm, blue notes and the idioms of the popular band with the concert tradition, and Bernstein continued the crossover with vivid syncopation and jazz-tinged harmony. They show how the vernacular language of jazz was absorbed into orchestral and stage works, expanding the concert palette.

Try this

Q1. Name two extended techniques and the instruments they are used on. [2 marks]

• Cue. For example sul ponticello or col legno on strings, flutter-tonguing or multiphonics on wind, and the prepared piano on keyboard. (Any two valid pairs.)

Q2. Explain the difference between musique concrete and electronic synthesis. [2 marks]

• Cue. Musique concrete is built from recorded real-world sounds that are manipulated (looped, reversed, speed-altered); synthesis generates sounds electronically rather than recording them.

Q3. Explain what indeterminacy contributes to a contemporary work. [3 marks]

• Cue. It leaves some aspect of the music (the order of events, the exact pitches or durations) to chance or to performer choice, so the materials are fixed but part of the structure is not, and no two performances are identical.