tone-cluster

Similarly, the “tone-cluster” writing of another American innovator, Henry Cowell, whereby a pianist’s forearm sounds every note it can depress at once, can hardly be analyzed as functional harmony in any sense.

Seeking new sonorities, he developed “tone clusters,” chords that on the piano are produced by simultaneously depressing several adjacent keys (e.g., with the forearm). Later he called these sonorities secondal harmonies—i.e., harmonies based on the interval of a second in contrast to the traditional basis of a third. These secondal…