This chapter presents an understanding of compositional practice based fundamentally on sound and space, and looks at a range of case studies that explore the harmonic, timbral, and material consequences of this approach. The chapter concludes by arguing that the variety of approaches discussed succeed because the concern with sound permeates every stage of compositional thinking and does not just manifest in specific compositional techniques.

This chapter demarcates two eras of piano composition – pre-Debussy and post-Debussy – by taking as its focal point a comment made by the pianist Marguerite Long that since Debussy no one has heard or played the piano in the same way as it was played before. As crude as these delineations are, the goal is to emphasise the truly transformative nature of his approach to thinking about the piano in its entirety – as a technological machine, a source of unlimited and variegated sonority, and a catalyst for freeing the human imagination. While taking into consideration the pianistic tradition that Debussy was born into and the one that he was propelled towards – spurred on by the innovations of his contemporaries at the piano, including Gabriel Fauré, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Maurice Ravel – this chapter highlights Debussy’s uniquely refined sense of how the piano might be made to sound anew. By the turn of the twentieth century he was beginning to establish his status as a trailblazer at the keyboard. It would be up to his immediate successors, particularly the French composers Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, to extend the expressive potential of his engagement with the sensual, dramatic, and formal potentials of sound into a dimension that exploited aspects of acoustics and resonance.

Whilst Richard Wagner has long been acknowledged as one of the central figures in the history of orchestration, his treatment of the orchestra has only rarely received scholarly attention. This chapter uses a series of analytical vignettes to examine Wagner’s approach to the orchestra, each addressing a paradox or opposition. The aim is not to expound some grand, overarching narrative, but, instead, to use the friction between competing factors to demonstrate the inherent complexity of Wagner’s approach to the orchestra. The multidimensionality of Wagner’s orchestration is also seen in the highly nuanced interaction of its three main parameters: texture, timbre, and spatiality. The development of Wagner’s orchestration over his lifetime is not presented as a continuous progression; the individuality of each of Wagner’s scores – and even of scenes within those operas – reflects the inseparability of Wagner’s orchestration from its dramatic motivation.

In the nineteenth century, E. T. A. Hoffmann invoked the Magic Flute as an example of restraint in orchestration: despite the opera’s trials and tribulations, the music never descends into bombast. Other critics were underwhelmed by the orchestration, which seems devoid of the instrumental effects promised by the title. This essay argues that the magic of Mozart’s orchestration lies in the ways in which it constructs different relationships with the stage action. Whether it’s the acoustic portraits of characters such as the Three Spirits, the pragmatics (and illusions) of on-stage musical performance, or the musical control of performing bodies by seemingly self-playing instruments, Mozart’s orchestration thematizes relationships between sounds and their sources. This essay puts the instruments of the pit in dialogue with the instruments on stage and, in so doing, illuminates the subtle ways in which Mozart uses the orchestra, as much as his characters, to tell his last story.

This chapter presents an overview of timbre in metal production from a psychoacoustic and computational musicology perspective, particularly focusing on the use of acoustic feature extraction. Both performance and recording technology have undoubtedly influenced tone in metal productions, but how can the underlying acoustic feature sets shaped by this technology inform production and analysis? This chapter includes an applied feature set extraction of stems from My Dying Bride, and concludes with a speculative view of how such features could be used in the training of machine learning classifiers.

The decade of the 1950s witnessed a great transformation in the compositional practice of Pierre Boulez. The usual narratives of serialism during this decade have tended to dwell on Boulez’s experiments with multiple serialism in Structure Ia (1951), which were tremendously short lived. His desire to expand the serial principle, however, did not end with them. Ensuing works, like Le Marteau sans maître (1952–5), Pli selon pli (1957–62/89), and the Third Piano Sonata (1955–7/63), which brought Boulez to the pinnacle of his reputation within the European circle of composers, are those that truly redefined serialism. Through this redefinition, serialism remained an important element of Boulez’s compositional technique until the end of his career. This chapter shows that Boulez’s serialism was an essential forerunner of future trends, rather than a culmination of an abandoned practice, resulting in works and approaches that opened up new avenues for composition.

Pears was innately skilled at the creation of new song works, making him the ideal collaborator for composers and clearly an inspirational artist for whom to write. Yet there was something more. With Pears there was the concomitant presence of all of the particles inherent to the creative process. He was a prolific reader and therefore the ideal text interpreter, with an extensive range of colours and dynamics that were technically available in his voice paired with his seemingly boundless artistic instincts. This tenor’s voice was not universally admired. Yet Pears’s recordings of Britten set the gold standard against which all successive generations of Britten interpreters would need to measure up – defining if not implying an authoritative version for phrasing, dynamics, vocal colours, textual inflection, and tempi, at the very least. This chapter explores the first performances of Pears’s association with dozens of living composers, works for unaccompanied tenor, and combinations of tenor and piano, guitar, harp, and chamber orchestra. The chapter concludes with a table of all of the tenor’s premieres.

In this chapter, I explore the aesthetics of drumming in Americana, focusing particularly on the work of session drummer Jay Bellerose. By attending to the material cultures and various lineages of drumming in the genre – spanning from the blues to country, jazz, rock, and early field recordings – I consider how an underlying aesthetic discourse inflects Americana drum kit performance and reception. Specifically, I outline how discussions about ideal drum tones, ‘less-is-more’ approaches, and preferences for American-made vintage kits signal shared understandings about percussive music making in the genre; highlighting key figures that helped develop recording techniques and drumming conventions.