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Timbre-Based Composition for the Guitar
A Non-guitarist’s Approach to Mapping and Notation
by Jason Noble and Steve Cowan
Soundboard Scholar, no. 6 (2020), 22–35
Music | Figures | Bibliography | About the Authors
Music
Scores for any of the works featured on this page are available from the composer by request.
fantaisie harmonique
Introduction by Steve Cowan:
fantaisie harmonique is a piece for double-guitar orchestra (six classical guitar parts, six electric parts). The piece utilizes six different scordatura tunings to cover an extended microtonal range across the different guitars. It is an exploration of timbre on the guitar, relying mostly on harmonics, open strings, and percussive mutes as opposed to traditional playing techniques. This recording was engineered by Denis Martin at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, and uses new Dolby Atmos software to create a three-dimensional listening experience. The video you see is the spatialization software that Denis used when mixing. When wearing headphones, you should get a sense of the physical space the different parts are existing within, at the same time seeing the visual representation in the mixing software. A new 360-degree video is currently in progress and will be premiered as part of the 2021 21st Century Guitar Conference (March 22–26, 2021, online). All twelve guitar parts are performed by Steve Cowan, recorded in August 2020.
Take Me Back
Jason Noble, Take Me Back (2017), for electric guitar and electronics track, performed by Steve Cowan.
we never told nobody
Jason Noble, we never told nobody (2019), performed by Steve Cowan.
Shadow Prism
Jason Noble, Shadow Prism (2015) for guitar, performed by Steve Cowan on his album Pour Guitare (2016)
The same performance with the score:
Figures
The journal article includes twenty-one figures and six tables—some marked as online only. This section contains the online figures and tables.
Bibliography
Bogaards, Niels, Philippe Depalle, et al. AudioSculpt (version 3.4.5). Paris: IRCAM, 2015. Software.
Bream, Julian. “How to Write for the Guitar.” Guitar Forum, no. 2 (2003): 1–8.
Bryan, Van. “Heraclitus (535–475 BCE).” Classical Wisdom, July 17, 2013. Online.
Cowan, Steven. “Between Speech and Music: Composing for Guitar with Dialectal Patterns.” DMus essay, McGill University, 2019.
Douglas, Chelsea, Jason Noble, and Stephen McAdams. “Auditory Scene Analysis and the Perception of Sound Mass in Ligeti’s Continuum.” Music Perception 33, no. 3 (2016): 287–305.
Godfrey, Jonathan. Principles of Idiomatic Guitar Writing. PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013.
Grisey, Gérard. “Tempus ex Machina: A Composer’s Reflections on Musical Time.” Contemporary Music Review 2, no. 1 (1987): 239–75. Online.
Harvey, Jonathan. “Spectralism.” Contemporary Music Review 19, no. 3 (2001): 11–14.
Hasegawa, Robert. “Gérard Grisey and the ‘Nature’ of Harmony.” Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 349–71.
Hervé, Jean-Luc. Dans Le Vertige de la durée: Vortex Temporum de Gérard Grisey. Collection Musique et Musicologie. Paris: L’Itinéraire, 2001.
Jones, Marie Reiss. “Musical Time.” In Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, edited by Susan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut, 81–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Josel, Seth, and Ming Tsao. The Techniques of Guitar Playing. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2014.
Kanno, Mieko. “Prescriptive Notation: Limits and Challenges.” Contemporary Music Review 26, no. 2 (2007): 231–54. Online.
Klingbiel, Michael. SPEAR (Sinusoidal Partial Editing, Analysis, and Resynthesis) (version 0.7.4). New York: Columbia University, 2009. Software.
Laganella, David. The Composer’s Guide to the Electric Guitar. Pacific, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 2003.
Large, Edward. “President’s Address.” Presentation, Conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, August 3, 2015.
Ligeti, György. Volumina (1962–63, 1967). Frankfurt: Litolff/Peters, 1973.
McAdams, Stephen. “The Perceptual Representation of Timbre.” In Timbre: Acoustics, Perception, and Cognition, edited by Kai Siedenburg, Charalampos Saitis, Stephen McAdams, Arthur Popper, and Richard Fay, 23–57. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019.
Mirka, Danuta. The Sonoristic Structuralism of Krzysztof Penderecki. Katowice, Poland: Music Academy, 2014.
Noble, Jason. Perceptual and Semantic Dimensions of Sound Mass. PhD Dissertation, McGill University, 2018.
———. “What Can the Temporal Structure of Auditory Perception Tell Us about Musical ‘Timelessness’?” Music Theory Online 24, no. 3 (2018). Online.
———. Shadow Prism (2015). Lévis, QC: Productions d’Oz, 2019.
Penderecki, Krzysztof. Polymorphia (1961). Celle: Hermann Moeck, 1963.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Modern Library, 1941.
Roads, Curtis. Microsound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Schneider, John. The Contemporary Guitar. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.
Scruton, Roger. “Programme Music.” Grove Music Online, 2001. Online.
Thoresen, Lasse and Hedman, Andreas. Emergent Musical Forms: Aural Explorations. London, ON: University of Western Ontario, 2015.
Titre, Marlon. Thinking Through the Guitar: The Sound-Cell-Texture Chain. PhD diss., Leiden University, 2013.
Tomaro, Robert. “Contemporary Compositional Techniques for the Electric Guitar in United States Concert Music.” Journal of New Music Research 23, no. 4 (1994): 349–67.
Traube, Caroline. An Interdisciplinary Study of the Timbre of the Classical Guitar. PhD Diss., McGill University, 2004.
———. “La Notation du timbre instrumental: noter la cause ou l’effet dans le rapport geste-son.” Circuit: Musiques contemporaines 25, no. 1 (2015): 21–37.
Truax, Barry. “Composing with Real-Time Granular Synthesis.” Perspectives of New Music 28, no. 2 (1990): 120–34.
Vishnick, Martin Lawrence. A Survey of Extended Techniques on the Classical Six-String Guitar with Appended Studies in New Morphological Notation. PhD diss., City University London, 2014.
Williams, Duncan, and Tim Brookes. “Perceptually Motivated Audio Morphing: Brightness.” Paper presented at the Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, Vienna, Austria, May 2007.
About the Authors
Steve Cowan is a prizewinner in ten national and international competitions who has performed and taught throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. His debut album, Pour guitare, features exclusively Canadian music. He has commissioned several new works for guitar and given world premieres in Paris, Toronto, New York, and other venues. He has given public masterclasses at the University of Victoria, McMaster University, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, the Royal Danish Academy of Music, and more. Originally from St. John's, Newfoundland, he holds degrees from Memorial University of Newfoundland, the Manhattan School of Music, and McGill University. His former teachers include Jérôme Ducharme, David Leisner, and Sylvie Proulx. In 2019, he joined the faculty of the Schulich School of Music of McGill University in Montréal. For more information, visit stevecowanmusic.com.
Jason Noble is a composer and researcher whose interests include semantics in contemporary music, timbre and orchestration, and musical narrativity. He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Université de Montréal (FRQSC). Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher with the ACTOR project (Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration). His PhD from McGill University was funded by the prestigious Vanier Scholarship (SSHRC). His research appears in Music Perception, Music Theory Online, Journal of New Music Research, Organised Sound, and the Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing, and he has presented at numerous national and international conferences His compositions have been performed across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Italy, and featured in numerous publications and broadcasts. His compositional work seeks balance between innovation and accessibility, motivated by a belief that contemporary music can be genuinely progressive and communicative at the same time. For more information, visit jasonnoble.ca.
