page_title: Tone cluster
section_title: Before the 1900s
hierarchical_section_title: Tone cluster / Use in Western music / Before the 1900s
caption_attribution_description: English: Loure from Bach, French Suite No 5, concluding bars
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: The earliest example of tone clusters in a Western music composition thus far identified is in the Allegro movement of Heinrich Biber's Battalia à 10 (1673) for string ensemble, which calls for several diatonic clusters. An orchestral diatonic cluster, containing all the notes of the harmonic minor scale, occurs also in the representation of chaos in the opening of Jean-Féry Rebel's 1737–38 ballet Les Élémens. 
  From the next century-and-a-half, a few more examples have been identified, mostly no more than a fleeting instance of the form, for example in the concluding two bars of the “Loure” from J.S.Bach’s French Suite No.5, BWV816:
  
  or the collisions that result from the interaction of multiple lines "locked together in suspensions" in Bach's Musical Offering: 
  
  In the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), we find a more daring and idiosyncratic use of tone clusters. In the following passage from the late 1740s, Scarlatti builds the dissonances over several bars:
   Ralph Kirkpatrick says that these chords "are not clusters in the sense that they are arbitrary blobs of dissonance, nor are they necessarily haphazard fillings up of diatonic intervals or simultaneous soundings of neighboring tones; they are logical expressions of Scarlatti’s harmonic language and organic manifestations of his tonal structure". Frederick Neumann describes Sonata K175 (1750s) as "full of Scarlatti's famous tone clusters". During this era, as well, several French programmatic compositions for the harpsichord or piano represent cannon fire with clusters: works by François Dandrieu (Les Caractères de la guerre, 1724), Michel Corrette (La Victoire d'un combat naval, remportée par une frégate contre plusieurs corsaires réunis, 1780), Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (March des Marseillois, 1793), Pierre Antoine César (La Battaille de Gemmap, ou la prise de Mons, c. 1794),  Bernard Viguerie (La Bataille de Maringo, pièce militaire et hitorique, for piano trio, 1800), and Jacques-Marie Beauvarlet-Charpentier (Battaille d'Austerlitz, 1805).
  A dramatic use of a "virtual" tone cluster can be found in Franz Schubert’s Song Der Erlkönig (1815–21).  Here, a terrified child calls out to his father when he sees an apparition of the sinister Erl King. The dissonant voicing of the dominant minor ninth chord used here (C⁷♭⁹) is particularly effective in heightening the drama and sense of threat.
  Writing about this passage, Taruskin (2010, p. 149) remarks on the “unprecedented… level of dissonance at the boy’s outcries…The voice has the ninth, pitched above, and the left hand has the seventh, pitched below.  The result is a virtual ‘tone cluster’...the harmonic logic of these progressions, within the rules of composition Schubert was taught, can certainly be demonstrated.  That logic, however, is not what appeals so strongly to the listener's imagination; rather it is the calculated impression (or illusion) of wild abandon.”
  
  The next known compositions after Charpentier's to feature tone clusters are Charles-Valentin Alkan's "Une fusée" (A Rocket) Op. 55, published in 1859, and his "Les Diablotins" (The Imps), a miniature from the set of 49 Esquisses (sketches) for solo piano, published in 1861. 
  
  There is also the solo piano piece Battle of Manassas, written in 1861 by "Blind Tom" Bethune and published in 1866. The score instructs the pianist to represent cannon fire at various points by striking "with the flat of the hand, as many notes as possible, and with as much force as possible, at the bass of the piano." In 1887, Giuseppe Verdi became the first notable composer in the Western tradition to write an unmistakable chromatic cluster: the storm music with which Otello opens includes an organ cluster (C, C♯, D) that also has the longest notated duration of any scored musical texture known. The choral finale of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 features a tone cluster of great poignancy arising naturally out of voice leading to the words “wird, der dich rief, dir geben”: 
   
   Still, it was not before the second decade of the twentieth century that tone clust
caption: Loure from Bach, French Suite No 5, concluding bars
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