Le 29 juin 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3206
Séance précomposée - Spectralism on the Margins: Spectral Ideas and Intercultural Influence
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Alexandra Monchick
One can draw broad comparisons between Hindemith’s aesthetics, theory, and practice with the Spectralists, even though he did not appear to have a direct influence on them. In his theoretical treatise, Unterweisung im Tonsatz (1937), Hindemith demonstrated that harmonic tension is grounded on perceived dissonance resulting from a natural phenomenon: the overtone series. While Hindemith’s harmonic theory largely derived from the experiments of Helmholtz and Stumpf, he put this theory into practice with three heretofore understudied electronic compositions that he wrote during the early 1930s. With the trautonium, he was able to produce subharmonics, combination tones, and formant regions from electronic sounds to create various new timbres, somewhat akin to the later processes of ring modulation and subtractive synthesis. While it initially appears that Hindemith’s concept of timbre was primarily rooted in register and instrumentation, his music from the 1930s shows that he was also thinking about the internal properties of sound.
Only after experimenting with the electronic manipulation of sound did Hindemith developed his influential music theory. His works from the 1930s on emphasized a kind of Spectral approach, but went beyond his inspiration from the overtone series. Like the Spectralists, Hindemith exploited human aural perception from both natural and technological perspectives. He reproduced both technological counterfeits of acoustic instruments with the trautonium and composed (and recomposed) music in the 1940s and 1950s based on perceptual acoustics put forth in his technique of “harmonic fluctuation.” In sum, Hindemith’s late music was inspired by a technologically-mediated concept of sound.
