ABSTRACT

This chapter suggests that the musical concept of timbre can function as an ideational “trading zone,” or Unscharfer Begriff. It explores some diverse treatments of timbre in Western and in Chinese music performance practice, in composition, and in musicological scholarship. The chapter discusses a parallel between the respective epistemic function of “atmosphere” and of “timbre,” as vague concepts in music scholarship. A combination of phenomenal dimensions together, atmospherically, form a gateway to such experiential possibilities. That they can be loosely conceived of as a single conceptual entity, timbre, Klangfarbe or yinse, speaks to the epistemological productiveness and affective power of vagueness. The chapter argues that in the West the notion of timbre has served as a mid-level conceptual “placeholder,” in the absence of more concrete analyses of acoustics and perception. As such it has travelled between music, aesthetics, psychology, physiology, acoustics and studies of culture more generally.