Clean as a Whistle

Abstract

This essay attempts to develop an interpretative framework for effects of timbre in selected twentieth-century instrumental music. My approach draws on ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales’s concept of “perceptualization” in order to establish expressive associations of transparency and turbidity with sinusoidal purity and spectral noise, respectively. I explore how these sonic tokens of purity and impurity are in turn mapped onto concepts of spirituality and corporeality in music of Varèse, Stockhausen, Messiaen, Gubaidulina, and especially George Crumb, whose workBlack Angelsis singled out for a detailed discussion of its timbral processes and their interpretive possibilities.