In my previous post I showed you a piece of piano music based on a Shepard Scale–it seems to go up and up forever. Listen to it (it’s at the bottom on this link), and then ask yourself: 1. Was that interesting? 2. Was that aesthetically pleasing or beautiful? 3. Was that music?

Most people would probably answer “no” to questions 2 and 3 after listening to that. It actually sounds stressful, even unpleasant. This, incidentally, is the general response of most people when they encounter contemporary classical music, especially the avant-garde stuff. However, if you are a modern composer, you are not most people.

Some people might ask, in response to question 1, what’s so interesting about a piece that sounds like it’s going up/down forever? It’s a cheap trick for nerds. To these people, if you are a modern composer, you should say “Uh, no!” after stammering a little. Then walk away, knowing in your heart that your tricks actually rather expensive, which is why you’re unemployed.

Part 2: Overtone Series

Now listen to this:

It’s a piece of “music” by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who loved useless concepts probably more than most smart people. His secret in this piece is the overtone series, a.k.a. harmonic series (or just “overtones”), combinations of pitches that fit a certain mathematical pattern. This pattern is what give natural sounds like a voice or an instrument their distinctive timbre (i.e. the “feel” or “texture” of a sound). In this piece, a chorus sings an overtone series dreamed up by the composer himself. What’s different about this, compared with, say, two country singers belting out a tune in parallel 3rds harmony, or a church choir singing a hymn, is that the pitch (and volume) of each voice is mathematically calculated to add up to something MORE than harmony. Stockhausen is basically using the choir to create a new “instrument” whose timbre comes from the precise combination of all the voices.

In this case the artificial “instrument” is a chorus that sounds weird. You can tell this is a significant achievement by imagining how long it took to convince a group of singers to sing random words from erotic poems that don’t sound like anything.

How about that Stockhausen? Interesting? Beautiful? Music?

No? A lot of other people would agree with you. They all went out to buy the Beatle’s “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” instead of going to hear this piece (both came out in the same year). But a small group of composers who call themselves “spectralists” (some call them “insane”) love it. In fact, if they had money they would buy computers and learn fancy math, so they can analyze the overtones of all sorts of sounds and write oodles of this kind of music.

If you think overtones are something that only nerds care about, you’re probably right, but just know that we’re talking about nerds from around the world here. There are folk music traditions based entirely on overtones. For example, check out this video of a Mongolian badass performing notes using the “throat singing” technique. Notice how, especially in the notes near the end of the video, you can hear very high pitched “buzzing” on top of the (mostly very low) bass notes he’s singing directly. These high pitches are overtones, and the Mongolian singer has developed his ability to control his vocal chords so that he can create melodies with those overtones. Note that every singer–and in fact, anything earthly that makes a sound–will create overtones. It’s just that usually overtones are very quiet and your ears focuses on the main pitch instead. Mongolian (and the related Tuvan) throat-singing flip that around, and draw your attention to the overtones by making the main pitch very very low.

Here’s a final, and much more familiar example of overtones used in music. This is a passage of a guitar prelude that is played with “harmonics”–the overtones on a stringed instrument that players create by touching a string lightly, but not pressing it down. Notice how they’re much quieter and purer sounding than the typical notes that you would hear from guitar strings.

Next time I’ll show you examples of 12-tone music, a style of composition that is actually more pleasing to look at than it is to listen to. This is why it is respected and emulated by true artists around the world.