#monophony

The focus here is on music that could've only been articulated by a monophonic texture in order to convey its compositional principles specific to the texture as a fundamental systematic criterion. In other words, the music does not use monophony as merely a 'piece' of that which can be found elsewhere within one's oeuvre systemically articulated polyphonically, homophonically, or heterophonically.

It's not an accident that most monophonic music included here is primarily for the electronic or vocal medium (what we now call monophony was initially called cantus, cf. Haug (2015)). Much contemporary electronic music is richly multi-timbral and polyphonic, but initially was not, due to technical limitations (Warner 2017). I suspect or conjecture or whatever that the motivations for the electronic medium to 'develop' beyond monophonic output were primarily ideological, i.e. musicological, and indicative of a myopic perceptual bias via the concurrent 'listening culture' (Lissa, Tanska, Tarska 1965). What if the output 'restrictions' of Mathews' MUSIC I or Moog's Model IIIc were maintained in the ensuing development of real-time software or more sophisticated SMT analog circuit topologies? What implications would that've had for compositional developments? Historical definitions of monophony throughout the literature are consistently coupled with references to primitive cultures and most post-medieval monophonic music is relegated to various 'studies', 'etudes', 'examples', 'student recital pieces', and so on (Randel 2003). Furthermore, monophonic music is commonly used as data for MIR research, for it meets the local optimum of feature parsability or whatever. I also suspect, much more speculatively, that monophony being basically synonymous with the so-called primitive, preliminary, or simple is indicative of a cognitivist bias that auditory streams are initially perceived as single and integrated and subsequently 'build up' in perceptual complexity as segregable and multistable, constructing a sufficient auditory scene (Deike et al. 2012).

Ainu, Hokkaido Island (Yoshi Shikato), Yukar Cathy Berberian, Stripsody John Cage, Solo For Voice 67 Sean Colum, 1-channel dynamic stochastic synthesis composite for Love Und Romance Vindictive New Town Shoplifting So Tough Instant Hit FM EVOL, Persisting Pinkness (Excerpt) Pietro Grossi, Monodia (Excerpt) Russell Haswell, Kinetic Scotch Tape (Excerpt) Hecker, IV Tom Johnson, Music With Mistakes (Excerpt) Lola Kiepja, Shamanic Chant No. 3 (Excerpt) Luciano Maggiore, Drenched Thatched Roof (Excerpt) Greta Monach, Fonergon 07-1 (Excerpt) Tom Mudd, Pile Up Part 1 One Hand Clapping, Relatively Healthy J.K. Randall, Quartersines James Tenney, Seegersong #2 (Excerpt) Iannis Xenakis, Mikka

【 Monophony 】Wakazaemon