In music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

, a simultaneity is more than one complete musical texture occurring at the same time, rather than in succession. This first appeared in the music of Charles Ives

Charles Ives

Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...

, and is common in the music of Conlon Nancarrow

Conlon Nancarrow

Conlon Nancarrow was a United States-born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He became a Mexican citizen in 1955.Nancarrow is best remembered for the pieces he wrote for the player piano...

 and others.

A pitch simultaneity is more than one pitch

Pitch (music)

Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...

 or pitch class

Pitch class

In music, a pitch class is a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart, e.g., the pitch class C consists of the Cs in all octaves...

 all of which occur at the same time, or simultaneously. Simultaneity is a more general term than chord

Chord (music)

A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...

: most chord progression

Chord progression

A chord progression is a series of musical chords, or chord changes that "aims for a definite goal" of establishing a tonality founded on a key, root or tonic chord. In other words, the succession of root relationships...

s or harmonic

Harmony

In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...

 progressions are then simultaneity succession

Simultaneity succession

In music and music theory a simultaneity succession is a series of different groups of pitches or pitch classes, each of which is played at the same time as the other pitches of its group...

s, though not all simultaneity successions are harmonic progressions and not all simultaneities are chords.

Further reading

• "Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought (I)", p.74. Benjamin Boretz. Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Autumn - Winter, 1969), pp. 1-106.

External links

• Simultaneity in Music by Robert Iolini. Extract from a Master of Arts thesis entitled Simultaneity in Music. Macquarie University. Sydney. Australia. February 1998.