![]() ![]() Commentators thus tend to identify diatonic and pentatonic stacks as "tone clusters" only when they consist of four or more successive notes in the scale. In Western musical traditions, pentatonic scales-conventionally played on the black keys-are built entirely from intervals larger than a semitone. This can readily be seen on a keyboard, where the pitch of each key is separated from the next by one semitone (visualizing the black keys as extending to the edge of the keyboard): Diatonic scales-conventionally played on the white keys-contain only two semitone intervals the rest are full tones. ![]() However, these stacks involve intervals between notes greater than the half-tone gaps of the chromatic kind. Three-note stacks based on diatonic and pentatonic scales are also, strictly speaking, tone clusters. Prototypical tone clusters are chords of three or more adjacent notes on a chromatic scale, that is, three or more adjacent pitches each separated by only a semitone. Three immediately adjacent keys produce a basic chromatic tone cluster. The modern keyboard is designed for playing a diatonic scale on the white keys and a pentatonic scale on the black keys. Keyboard instruments are particularly suited to the performance of tone clusters because it is relatively easy to play multiple notes in unison on them. Clusters may be performed with almost any individual instrument on which three or more notes can be played simultaneously, as well as by most groups of instruments or voices. In most Western music, tone clusters tend to be heard as dissonant. Tone clusters also play a significant role in the work of free jazz musicians such as Cecil Taylor and Matthew Shipp. Composers such as Béla Bartók and, later, Lou Harrison and Karlheinz Stockhausen became proponents of the tone cluster, which feature in the work of many 20th- and 21st-century classical composers. During the same period, Charles Ives employed them in several compositions that were not publicly performed until the late 1920s or 1930s. In the 1910s, two classical avant-gardists, composer-pianists Leo Ornstein and Henry Cowell, were recognized as making the first extensive explorations of the tone cluster. The early years of the twentieth century saw tone clusters elevated to central roles in pioneering works by ragtime artists Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin. On the piano, such clusters often involve the simultaneous striking of neighboring white or black keys. Variants of the tone cluster include chords comprising adjacent tones separated diatonically, pentatonically, or microtonally. For instance, three adjacent piano keys (such as C, C ♯, and D) struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale and are separated by semitones. The last two bars, played with overlapping hands, are a denser cluster.Ī tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three adjacent tones in a scale. The clusters in the upper staff-C ♯ D ♯ F ♯ G ♯-are four successive black keys. ![]()
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