Beyond Notes: Composing with Frequencies

The advent of electronic musical instruments, of course, changed the sound of music forever. But it also changed the music itself by enabling composers to both think and create outside the confines of classical notation. Here, we present a journey through the history of composition beyond pitch, melody and harmonic theory – from orchestral percussion to the first post-war electronic musical experiments.

Percussion is the class of instruments that are represented least accurately with traditional notation, given the complex, noise-like sounds they produce. Music for drums and cymbals is usually notated using single lines per instrument, indicating only the rhythm of each note, rather than their uncertain pitch. In the second half of the 19th century, many composers began to more consciously experiment with new sounds and timbres, incorporating more and more percussion into the orchestra and dramatically widening the sonic spectrum.

By the end of the 19th century, the rules and limitations of classical harmonic theory had effectively been dismantled. The opening of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, for example, contains a group of notes that have become known simply as the Tristan chord. The chord – built from a series of fourth intervals, as opposed to the traditional thirds – was unusual enough. But what makes it so significant is the inability of classical functional music theory to explain it. The Tristan chord is one of the first clear examples of a composer choosing notes not for their function in a traditional sense, but simply because of the way they sound when played: the chord's ambiguous dissonance suggests a degree of tension or unease.

While Schönberg and other theorists were rewriting the rules of composition, the first half of the 20th century bore witness to an explosion of technological progress that inspired other composers to seek out new instruments and sound sources. In the 1910s, Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo emancipated himself from classical orchestration by inventing a mechanical noise orchestra of his own, the Intonarumori.
 Without any electronics, the Intonarumori created a wide range of sounds through various mechanical means – a spinning wheel, for example, scraped against a string attached to a resonating drumhead.

By the mid-twentieth century, the availability of sound-recording and editing technology allowed composers to precisely construct music in the studio, on their own, and without any need for notation. A group of French experimentalists, led by Pièrre Schaeffer, developed the techniques of Musique Concrète, which revolved around the manipulation and arrangement of sounds on magnetic tape. This gave composers immediate control over the sonic results, but it was tedious work, involving the meticulous cutting and glueing together of countless snippets of plastic film.