Sound mass

[4] Explored by Charles Ives and Henry Cowell in the early part of the twentieth century, this technique also developed from the modernist tone clusters and spread to orchestral writing by the mid 1950s and 1960s.

[6] Examples can be found in Metastasis (1953–54), Pithoprakta (1955–56), and Achorripsis (1956–57), all orchestral works by Iannis Xenakis,[7] as well as in Gesang der Jünglinge for concrete and electronic sounds (1955–56), Zeitmaße for five woodwinds (1955–56), and Gruppen for three orchestras (1955–57), by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Beecroft "blurs individual pitches in favor of a collective timbre through the use of vocal and instrumental clusters, choral speech, narrator, and a wash of sounds from an electronic tape".

[2] A very early example is the opening of Jean-Féry Rebel's ballet Les Elémens (1737–38), where chaos is represented by a gradually cumulating orchestral cluster of all seven notes of the D minor scale.

[12] Other composers with works using this technique include Henryk Górecki, Karel Husa, Witold Lutosławski, Kazimierz Serocki, Steven Stucky, and George Crumb.

A texture may be arranged so as to "closely approach the single-object status of fused-ensemble timbres , for example, the beautiful 'northern lights' chord ..., in a very interesting distribution of pitches, produces a fused sound supported by a suspended cymbal roll ". [ 1 ]