ABSTRACT
The subject of my paper was announced as being the function of timbre in 20th century instrumental music. In fact I would prefer to deal with the relation between timbre and musical composition (écriture)8 and more generally speaking, timbre and language. Whatever the intention, it can be said that there are basically two ways of considering timbre: one is an objective, scientific way, beyond language, and without aesthetic criteria, in which there is an extreme difficulty in moving from the quantitative aspect back up to the qualitative. With the help of graphs and diagrams many acoustic phenomena can be described but the quality of integration of sound and timbre in the structure of a composition is absent from these measurements. Even when one deals phenomena and their quality, it is mostly a question of perception in isolation, exempt from any context. I feel that the truly artistic value of timbre is fundamentally forgotten using this approach.
