THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

30Robert
Morris, Composition with Pitch-Classes (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 282.
31
Robert Morris’s Composition with Pitch-Classes contains a similar list of elements
which can be arranged into linear continua analogous to his c-space (an “undifferentiated”
space modeling register where the size of specific intervals is indeterminate, but the
position of elements relative to one another can be ordered, for example, as high, low, and
middle).
1. c-space (low to high)
2. sequential time (early to late)
3. loudness (soft to loud)
4. timbre-color (dull to bright)
5. envelope (short to long)
6. internal agitation (slow to fast)
7. noise content (pure to noisy)
8. physical stereo-space-direction (left to right)
9. distance (far to near)
10. change in location (slow to fast) 30
Morris’s list contains many items analogous to Randall’s, and of particular salience for the
following study will be c-space (i.e. registral position), loudness, internal agitation, noise
content, and spatial separation. Morris’s categories for “timbre-color” and for “envelope”
are too general, already incorporating several dimensions of timbre; for “dull to bright”
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Morris deals with the relative amplitude between specific harmonic partials, and his
category for envelope seems to deal exclusively with the onset time for attacks, whereas I
will want to differentiate between attack, sustain, and decay properties.
Robert Cogan, mentioned above for his pioneering use of spectrographs, has also
compiled a particularly thorough list of timbral dimensions. Unlike the other authors,
Morris is most likely influenced in this regard by Wayne Slawson who has developed a similar theory of
sound color; see Wayne Slawson, Sound Color (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985) and “The Color
of Sound: a Theoretical Study in Musical Timbre” Music Theory Spectrum 3 (1981), 132-41.
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