page_title: Tone cluster
section_title: In classical music of the early 1900s
hierarchical_section_title: Tone cluster / Use in Western music / In classical music of the early 1900s
caption_attribution_description: Leo Orstein at a piano, published in Martens, Frederick Herman (1918) "Frontispiece" in Leo Ornstein: The Man — His Ideas — His Work, New York, United States: Breitkopf &amp; Hartel Retrieved on 22 September 2011.
context_page_description: A tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three adjacent tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster. Variants of the tone cluster include chords comprising adjacent tones separated diatonically, pentatonically, or microtonally. On the piano, such clusters often involve the simultaneous striking of neighboring white or black keys.
  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. 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. During the same period, Charles Ives employed them in several compositions that were not publicly performed until the late 1920s or 1930s. 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.
context_section_description: "Around 1910," Harold C. Schonberg writes, "Percy Grainger was causing a stir by the near–tone clusters in such works as his Gumsuckers March." In 1911, what appears to be the first published classical composition to thoroughly integrate true tone clusters was issued: Tintamarre (The Clangor of Bells), by Canadian composer J. Humfrey Anger (1862–1913).
  Within a few years, the radical composer-pianist Leo Ornstein became one of the most famous figures in classical music on both sides of the Atlantic for his performances of cutting-edge work. In 1914, Ornstein debuted several of his own solo piano compositions: Wild Men's Dance (aka Danse Sauvage; c. 1913–14), Impressions of the Thames (c. 1913–14), and Impressions of Notre Dame (c. 1913–14) were the first works to explore the tone cluster in depth ever heard by a substantial audience. Wild Men's Dance, in particular, was constructed almost entirely out of clusters (listen ). In 1918, critic Charles L. Buchanan described Ornstein's innovation: "[He] gives us masses of shrill, hard dissonances, chords consisting of anywhere from eight to a dozen notes made up of half tones heaped one upon another."
  
  Clusters were also beginning to appear in more pieces by European composers. Isaac Albéniz's use of them in Iberia (1905–8) may have influenced Gabriel Fauré's subsequent piano writing. Joseph Horowitz has suggested that the "dissonant star clusters" in its third and fourth books were particularly compelling to Olivier Messiaen, who called Iberia "the wonder of the piano." The Thomas de Hartmann score for Wassily Kandinsky's stage show The Yellow Sound (1909) employs a chromatic cluster at two climactic points. Alban Berg's Four Pieces for clarinet and piano (1913) calls for clusters along with other avant-garde keyboard techniques. Claude Debussy's Piano Prelude "La Cathédrale Engloutie" makes powerful use of clusters to evoke the sound of “pealing bells – with so many added major seconds one would call this pan-diatonic harmony.”
   In his 1913 piano prelude "General Lavine – Excentric", one of the first pieces to be influenced by black American popular styles (the Cakewalk) Debussy features abrasive tone clusters at the conclusion of the following passage: 
   In his 1915 arrangement for solo piano of his Six Epigraphes Antiques (1914), originally a set of piano duets, Debussy includes tone clusters in the fifth piece, Pour l'Egyptienne.
    Russian composer Vladimir Rebikov used them extensively in his Three Idylles, Op. 50, written in 1913. Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony (1915) "starts and ends with the setting sun—a B flat minor chord cluster slowly built down."
  Though much of his work was made public only years later, Charles Ives had been exploring the possibilities of the tone cluster—which he referred to as the "group chord"—for some time. In 1906–7, Ives composed his first mature piece to extensively feature tone clusters, Scherzo: Over the Pavements. Orchestrated for a nine-piece ensemble, it includes both black- and white-note clusters for the piano. Revised in 1913, it would not be recorded and published until the 1950s and would have to wait until 1963 to receive its first public performance. During the same period that Ornstein was introducing tone clusters to the concert stage, Ives was developing a piece with what would become the most famous set of clusters: in the second movement, "Hawthorne," of the Concord Sonata (c. 1904–15, publ. 1920, prem. 1928, rev. 1947), mammoth piano chords require a wooden bar almost fifteen inches long to play. The gentle clusters produced by the felt- or flannel-covered bar represent the sound of far-off church bells (listen ). Later in the movement, there are a series of five-note diatonic clusters for the right hand. In his notes to the score, Ives indicates that "these group-chords...may, if the player feels like it, be hit with the clenched fist." Between 1911 and 1913, Ives also wrote ensemble pieces with tone clusters such as his Second String Quartet and the orchestral Decoration Day and Fourth of July, though none of thes
caption: Leo Ornstein was the first composer to be widely known for using tone clusters—though the term itself was not yet used to describe the radical aspect of his work.
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