The Oxford Handbook of Timbre

Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century, denigrated during the nineteenth, the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century and its fascination with synthesizers and electronic music-or so the story goes. But in fact, timbre cuts across all the boundaries that make up musical thought-combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music.

The twenty-five essays that make up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are set as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the tv show The Voice, from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late-nineteenth-century Europe.

Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuously demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists pinning complete down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up.

Emily I. Dolan is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, and specializes in late Enlightenment and early Romantic music and aesthetics. She is the author of The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and is working
on her second book, Instruments and Order.

Alexander Rehding teaches music theory at Harvard University. He specializes in the music of the nineteenth century, history of music theory, and media theory. His publications include Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003), Music and Monumentality (2009), and Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony (2017). He is editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbooks Online in Music and series editor for a forthcoming six-volume Cultural History of Music.