Orchestration Postdoc Blog (OPDB) #6

Project Blog | Postdoc | Matthew Zeller | September 9, 2020

Hello world!

I am Matthew Zeller, one of the new ACTOR postdocs (along with Lindsey Reymore) here at McGill. I’ll be working in the Output Innovation Axis to develop music- theoretic frameworks of timbre’s role in music, pedagogical tools, as well as musical and cultural exchanges through the lens of timbre studies.

I’m excited to continue my research on Klangfarbenmelodie and the Second Viennese School and to extend my approach to popular music and music from various cultures around the world. My dissertation, “Planal Analysis and the Emancipation of Timbre: Klangfarbenmelodie and Timbral Function in Mahler, Schoenberg, and Webern,” focuses on timbre’s functional role in musical logic in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century music, formulates analytical language specific to timbre, and develops a new analytical method—planal analysis. A major part of the ACTOR research activities revolves around auditory scene analysis, and I am eager to incorporate this into my approach of multiple analytical planes. I look forward to collaborating with other researchers in the ACTOR network to further entwine these methods and to broaden the repertory to which this approach is applied.

I am also an organologist and violin bow maker (although I don’t work at the bench much anymore). Before training in bow making, I studied violin restoration as well as brass and woodwind restoration. I will enthusiastically bring my organological voice to ACTOR and the Timbre and Orchestration Resource.

Perhaps it is the proverbial chicken or egg argument—I am not sure if it was my love of different timbres in music or my tinkering and toying with musical instruments that led to my passion for all-things timbre. But regardless, musical instruments, the sounds they make, and how those sounds are used in music is the driving force in my work.