ABSTRACT
In 1909, soon after Schoenberg had produced his first consistently atonal pieces, he also began to conceive of a type of music in which tone color, or timbre, would replace pitch as a primary structural determinant. In his Harmonielehre (1911), Schoenberg recognized three characteristics of musical sound (Klang): pitch, color, and volume. 1 Until then, musical sound had been measured in only one of those dimensions, namely pitch. He theorized that a musical sound was primarily determined by the second dimension—tone color (Klangfarbe)—and suggested the term Klangfarbenmelodien to describe a “melodic” pattern produced exclusively by changes in the timbre, duration, and dynamics of a single pitch or chord. Schoenberg anticipated the importance that the systematic organization of tone color was to have in the course of contemporary musical developments:
Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colors that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call “melodies,” progressions, whose coherence (Zusammenhang) evokes an effect analogous to thought processes, then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colors of the other dimension, out of that which we call simply “tone color”. … That has the appearance of a futuristic fantasy and is probably just that. But it is one which, I firmly believe, will be realized. 2
