Sound Directions

Posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 8:17 am

If you’ve attended any sort of new or experimental music performance, there’s a chance you may have heard some of the instruments making some pretty unorthodox sounds. Weird sounds, or extended techniques as they’re called, are not all that new music is made up of (thankfully), but they’re sometimes a part of the new musical soundscape. Here’s a short historical primer on these less conventional sounds.

Extended techniques, as the name implies, requires the performer to play their instrument in a manner outside of what would be considered a traditionally established norm—”extending” the instrument’s traditional sound-making capabilities, so to speak. These techniques include multiphonics, circular breathing, quarter-tones, slap-tonguing, key clicks, muting, playing with the mouthpiece alone, tapping on the instrument’s body, all manners of bowing, and playing on the inside of the piano, to name just a few. Extended techniques as we know them today first appeared in concert music in the early twentieth century–Henry Cowell’s Tides of Manaunaun (1915), Mosolov’s Iron Foundry (1928), Varese’s Ionisation (1929-31)–but experienced a true renaissance in the 1960s.

Because of the growing world of electronic music during the 1960s, composers were now confronted with the task of finding a way to bridge the gap between the seemingly disparate electronic and acoustic sound worlds. Extended techniques provided that link. While the exploration of extended techniques in new music was widespread, many people point to the publication of the Italian theorist/composer Bruno Bartolozzi’s New Sounds for Woodwind in the late 1960s as a codification of these efforts.

Extended techniques offer a way for a performer to personalize their instrument and draw out its unique qualities, and in the process develop a very unique stylistic approach and sonic vocabulary. In concert music, these techniques more or less ran their course in the 1960s and 1970s, with the most advances and interesting work with them being done in the 1990s not by composers, but free improvisers and electronic musicians. As a result, extended techniques have become an integral part of each instrument’s identity and are no longer an “other” in instrumental technique.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sprinkling in some posts dedicated to particular extended techniques to help familiarize the less familiar with some of these sounds. However, if you’re looking for some immediate gratification in the form of a sonic crash course, might I suggest attending Mobtown Modern‘s performance of John Zorn’s Cobra this Wednesday evening at 8 p.m. at The Metro Gallery.

Filed in: Extended Techniques.

Tags: bruno bartolozzi, history, multiphonics