recommend me some pieces that are based on the harmonic series

I'm writing a piece which might be based on a harmonic series. I've never done this before, so it would be good to look at pieces that do this. Prefferably something not too hard to analyse. Thanks!

I'm interested too, if anyone has examples.

Time was that anyone who wrote for natural brass instruments was almost completely locked into the harmonic series trumpets and horns could produce naturally, so technically speaking, just about any orchestral work including brass written before 1840 was a study in how to use the limitations of the instruments to advantage. But I imagine there must have been quite a few 20th Century composers who explored this more broadly and generally.

Anything by Hindemith after he wrote The Craft of Musical Composition. How do you plan to use the harmonic series in your composition?

V-I is already based on the harmonic series, and not only that.

I like Hindemith's treatise, though it's technically questionable in some points. But the more important thing is the resultant compositional system and the great music he created with it.

Well, some of the most obvious examples come from spectralism, such as Grisey's "espaces acoustiques", "

" most clearly. Or, for a more kitschy example, Stockhausen's .

Many brass pieces, but especially horn pieces, make extensive use of the harmonic series, such as Ligeti's

or his , most clearly as "scales" in its second movement. (And of course there's every single piece ever composed for alphorn :P)

Other instruments that lend itself very well to playing with the harmonic series are strings playing natural harmonics, of course.

Many composers have of course also stylised forms of the series as an insprisation. Example,

, clearly audible when the Xylophone sets in the first time.

And technically, any piece that features polyrhythms like 3:4:5:6:7 etc. is "based on the harmonic series" - just in a very low frequency range.

V-I is already based on the harmonic series, and not only that.

I don't quite understand. The lower notes of the harmonic series are pretty much a V7 sound, but they don't imply any V-I functionality. A cadence is a movement after all, not a sound.

I was thinking about spectral music, but my experience with it is quite limited, so I don't find myself capable of recommending anything specific.

Well, V-I is motion, but it leads to sound, to specific sonic effects as well as psychological ones. This isn't 'random', but also I am not saying that the overtone series naturally, by itself, implies this, just as it doesn't naturally imply the above-mentioned polyrhythms. What I was refering to is the significance of the harmonic series, the mathematical ratios therein, in the development of the Western musical system and musical thought. We (or at least I) cannot deny that.

We may also say that the harmonic series forms pretty much a triad, a seventh or a ninth chord, and in reality, different musicians and acousticians tend to report different audibility of the harmonics. But I wouldn't say they have equal value or weight - their significance (based on their amplitude) generally diminishes with increasing the harmonic number, and psychoacoustical models that make reference to them often assign them weights based on that, though this is debatable.

By V7 we usually understand a dominant seventh chord by default, but what we have in the harmonic series isn't really a dominant seventh chord, but a harmonic seventh chord, which we may find in a 7-limit tuning, for example. And the sonic experience upon hearing this chord is different - to my ears, unlike the typical dominant seventh, it sounds more stable, nearly in rest, and, as expected, more consonant.

All this reminds me of (one more) theory I encountered some time ago that takes D7 as 'the chord of nature' (again) (as opposed to Schenker, for example, who takes the major triad) and argues that due to this, every single tone has an inherent tendency to move down a perfect fifth. Some of the weak points I personally found in it stem from the lines above.

Perhaps, one of the reasons for the huge theoretical dwelling on these topics is the wish of some people to connect music with nature and explain it on natural basis (which is sometimes even used, as it seems to me, as a basis of attempts to show what is 'good' in music), but this tends to meet lots of trouble and inconsistencies. For me, personally, the various musical and compositional systems are not more or less natural, for music is art and as such it is artifical.

Perhaps, one of the reasons for the huge theoretical dwelling on these topics is the wish of some people to connect music with nature and explain it on natural basis (which is sometimes even used, as it seems to me, as a basis of attempts to show what is 'good' in music), but this tends to meet lots of trouble and inconsistencies. For me, personally, the various musical and compositional systems are not more or less natural, for music is art and as such it is artifical.

There we go, someone who finally thinks about music the way I do :santa: . Someone I know constantly dismisses any music that has any more ''modern undertones'' than impressionism (he thinks the Rite of Spring is an ear-killer, along with anything Bartok, Ravel even sometimes) on the basis that only the tonal system and consonance are ''biologically correct'', citing that our ears and brains are built to accept only that and deem anything else ugly. I find that a shoddy and untrue argument (especially that most people and virtually all musicians appreciate the works he does not), serving only to justify an extremely closed and blinded point of view.

Sorry for the rant, back to the thread now. :phones: