Heterophony

[Joseph K]

Erstwhile forum-contributor Pulcinella has contacted me with this email:

Hello Joseph K

In that very peculiar way that things occasionally happen, the word heterophonic has cropped up in the sleeve notes (by Bayan Northcott) of a CD I have just put on, describing the finale (by Tippett) of the Severn Bridge Variations:

.....Tippett then works through the theme in an urgent texture of heterophonic doublings – a technique he had first used in his opera King Priam and which was to play an ever more central role in his later works.

Happy for you to copy/paste on the thread, if you want.
This is the CD:

https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...mes-variations

[Joseph K]

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPajdk_iijI

Playing now. It's very nice. The shehnai-esque oboe has not long come in. Colourful, with pre-echoes to this listener of Red Earth in the way he goes about things.

[Mandryka]

Playing now. It's very nice. The shehnai-esque oboe has not long come in. Colourful, with pre-echoes to this listener of Red Earth in the way he goes about things.

It's on this CD, which is one of my favourite Finnissy recordings - the trio is exceptional.

https://www.discogs.com/Michael-Finnissy-Uroboros-Ensemble-Gagliano-Trio-Ensemble-Expos%C3%A9-C%C3%A2tana-String-Trio-Contret%C3%A4nze/release/8253068

[Joseph K]

It's on this CD, which is one of my favourite Finnissy recordings - the trio is exceptional.

https://www.discogs.com/Michael-Finn...elease/8253068

The trio is also on youtube. How is the Contretaenze? (The only work from the disk apparently not on youtube).

I've just put the String Trio on.

[Mandryka]

I like medieval heterophony most

[Mandryka]

The trio is also on youtube. How is the Contretaenze? (The only work from the disk apparently not on youtube).

I've just put the String Trio on.

I can't remember -- I'll listen tonight or tomorrow.

[Joseph K]

I like medieval heterophony most

It crossed my mind about this music - whether it would be considered heterophonic or polyphonic, I'm not sure...

[Mandryka]

It crossed my mind about this music - whether it would be considered heterophonic or polyphonic, I'm not sure...

Well it is in the textbooks! In fact I first came across the word heterophony from the mouth of someone writing a doctorate on something to do with medieval music, and then was quite surprised a while afterwards to hear it again in Stockhausen’s English language lecture on Mantra.

Listening to contretanze now, it’s very dramatic sounding in the opening, and then becomes spare, introverted and complicated stuff - sections - all of it alien - music from Mars sort of thing - I need to give it some good attention - you know the sort of thing , my radar is telling me that this is interesting music.


Oooo - there’s a heterophonic passage . . .

How strange that the person who was writing this stuff in the 1980s came up with Pious Anthems and Voluntaries a couple of years ago. Have I changed that much? I don’t know . .

[ahinton]

Apologies - my eyesight's playing up today. This is the one I meant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xXSoogzRP4

No problem! Many thanks for this. Muraro is really quite something!...

[Mandryka]

I’m not sure if there’s much heterophonic music from the 14th century. I’m listening to the long three part strophic song - lai maybe - called En demantant et lamentant and it sure sounds heterophonic to me, but I’m not sure and I haven’t seen the score. Basically it may be a melody in the one voice (not necessarily the triplum) and the same melody with diminutions in another. The recording is very well engineered, by the way - impressive.

[vinteuil]

...Surely it's one of the most original and powerful solo piano compositions of the 20th century!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAhxuM-O8Cs

... many many thanks for that. Beautiful. And stupendous playing!




.

[gradus]

As Mr Huisman's website says 'with passion but without frills'. Extraordinary pianism.

[Richard Barrett]

I’m not sure if there’s much heterophonic music from the 14th century.

In fact there's a great deal but it's to be found in music that's notated monophonically rather than with polyphonic music, in which the voices have a different kind of relationship. In the 1970s Thomas Binkley released two volumes of chansons by Machaut, one concentrating exclusively on monophonic songs and the other on polyphonic ones. In his notes IIRC Binkley remarks that the polyphonic music requires a relatively strict approach to realisation so that the relationships between the voices are clear (he likens this to contemporary fixed-media compositions), whereas the monophonic music (which he compares with more "aleatoric" works) allows the addition of drones, improvised heterophonic elements and so on. The same kinds of considerations apply to mediaeval music more generally. Heterophony was surely present, but didn't need to be notated (in fact would in some ways have been impossible to notate with the notations then in use).

[Joseph K]

[Joseph K]

I’m not sure if there’s much heterophonic music from the 14th century. I’m listening to the long three part strophic song - lai maybe - called En demantant et lamentant and it sure sounds heterophonic to me, but I’m not sure and I haven’t seen the score. Basically it may be a melody in the one voice (not necessarily the triplum) and the same melody with diminutions in another. The recording is very well engineered, by the way - impressive.

This might be the organisational principle there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isorhythm