Timbre Composition: Ideology, Metaphor and Social Process

Waters, Simon

1994

Contemporary Music Review 10(2): 129-134.

Language: English

Timbral music is frequently considered in phenomenological terms which purport to have objective or non-metaphoric status, and which suggest that music can be usefully regarded as a system of autonomous timbral objects. In this article, the author suggests that current debates (1994) concerning the interpretive status of the observer, and changes in the representational nature of language make such analyses problematic, drawing attention to the extent to which social processes construct the context for musical phenomena, and the languages in which they are described. Timbral listening is therefore considered as an intentional process.