Il contrabbasso è stato in prima linea nello sviluppo delle risorse timbriche della musica d’arte contemporanea, messe a disposizione dei compositori ed esecutori in egual modo. Paradossalmente l’espansione dei mezzi per l’esplorazione timbrica del contrabbasso è stata accompagnata, in alcuni casi, da una riduzione reciproca nell’uso della sostanza tonale. Il risultato è una sorta di minimalismo a corda aperta. Il recente e classico lavoro fatto da Arnold Dreyblatt, Adriano Orrù e Alessandro Perini mostra come la singola corda impostata per la vibrazione, può essere sviluppata in una produzione sonora raffinata di sorprendente complessità aurale.
***
“Proposition IX: To explain why an open string when sounded makes many sounds at once.” (Marin Mersenne, Harmonie Universelle, 1632. Quoted from Arnold Dreyblatt’s notebooks.)
1
![](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2D0QXtJFCp4/VQmuAroSycI/AAAAAAAAAPU/dzf_WMVcYFA/s1600/Harmonics-600x566.jpg)
2
The open string is in a sense a single pitch that contains multitudes. Attacked a certain way, it reveals the overtone structure that constitutes the timbral dimension of pitch. As Robert Erickson termed it in Sound Structure in Music, pitches are bundles of harmonics or partials that tend to fuse into a single percept. Given the right circumstances individual harmonics within the bundle can be brought to prominence, allowing the single pitch to be unraveled into what sounds like a set of pitches in harmonic relationship. Timbral music takes this as its starting point. If the perceived pitch of a sound is a function of the relative intensities of its partials, then manipulating a pitch to emphasize or deemphasize certain of its constituent partials will create the sound of a different apparent pitch or of an emergent set of harmonies.
Because of its scale and the length of its strings, the double bass is well-positioned to unbundle the harmonic structure of a pitch. As a practical matter this can be done by technical means such as altering finger pressure or changing the weight, attack and placement of the bow, angling its hair as it bites into or glides over the string. With each change a different range of overtones can be emphasized, giving a single pitch the sound of a chord. Similarly the use of percussive attacks with hands or objects on the strings or body of the instrument can alter the timbre of the sound, and thus underscore or suppress given partials, as can the use of electronics for amplification or direct sound modification.
3
Arnold Dreyblatt’s Nodal Excitation, the concept of which appears to date back to the late 1970s, is a work for solo double bass strung with two lengths of unwound music wire. Dreyblatt was drawn to the double bass because of its capacity for resonance, aided by the long speaking length of its strings, which seemed to suit his interest, primarily directed toward acoustics rather than music in any conventional sense, in what he calls the “basic acoustic model” of a sound source set in motion. In Nodal Excitation this model takes the form of strings set to vibrate, the resulting sounds consisting of the harmonics produced by light pressure on the strings’ nodes. Rather than drawing the bow across the strings, Dreyblatt uses the bow to strike them rhythmically for the entire length of the performance. (A realization of the piece recorded in Toronto in 2007 ran approximately twenty-five minutes.) The aim of Nodal Excitation is to unpack the harmonic series in the context of the structure of sound as such. Over the course of the performance emergent harmonics combine with the bass’s resonance and gradually stack up into chords. The musical effect this creates would appear to underline the implicitly polemical thrust of Nodal Excitation, which is to challenge the move of Western art music into equal temperament and toward atonality.
![](https://www.percorsimusicali.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/hesperos.png)
Like Orrù’s Cosmogonia semplice, composer Alessandro Perini’s electroacoustic Perturbance for Double Bass and Embedded Electronics takes the single open string, this time the A string, and explores its sounding properties. The work, the second in Perini’s Ghost Studies series, was created in collaboration with double bassist Jonathan Heilbron and was premiered at Darmstadt in August 2014. For this piece Perini installed contact speakers inside of Heilbron’s bass and called for Heilbron to perform a series of percussive gestures with his hands and bow. These gestures, in tandem with an electronic track fed into the speakers, set the instrument to vibrate semi-autonomously, the speakers effectively turning the bass into a large, resonating amplifier for the electronic sounds sent through them. Throughout the piece different timbral facets of the unstopped A string are brought out when it is set to vibrating by the speakers or when Heilbron strikes, scrapes, bows or muffles it.
4
Open string minimalism is a peculiar kind of minimalism. Minimal sculpture entailed a comparable paring down of material and of outward form, the resulting objects being notable for their lack of internal relationships. In that regard they are entirely different from the sound objects emerging from the open strings in Dreyblatt’s, Orrù’s and Perini’s works. These latter are not only rich in their display of internal structures but are almost entirely about these structures. Their minimalism is deceptive to the extent that it reveals the many layered complexity that constitutes what we ordinarily hear as a single pitch.
Work exploring the composite nature of the single pitch plays on the phenomenological or subjective dimension of musical reception. Somewhere at the intersection of perception and attention we take in the complex set of a tone’s fundamental and overtones and filter and fuse them into a single pitch. The pieces described above and other works like them in effect reverse the phenomenological process of fusion—if one can speak of reverse psychology one can speak of reverse phenomenology—and show the apparently simple sound for what it is: A bundle of moving and interacting parts.