El unísono impreciso: Contribución a una historia de la heterofonía (2010)

Abstract

The representation of musical texture was defined, well into the 20th-century, by a typological approach. Unalike conformations of musical simultaneity were characterized by means of a small collection of stylistic categories, dominated by the opposition between polyphony and homophony. Heterophony appears in this context as a category of uncertain statute, whose course in the development ofthe 20th-century musical thought is characterized by elements of discredit and apology, as well as by a persistent conceptual instability. The chapter reviews a series of stages in the theoretical development of the category from its origin with Plato, its institutionalization by German comparative musicology, its consideration by French ethnology, its generalization by historical musicology, until its consideration within the framework of a number of compositional poetics related to the New Music of the 60s, where it comes to converge with the concept of texture.