Ed Zubrow has asked me privately for a list of examples of heterophony in
Western music - ones audible to the amateur ear.

What makes this difficult in an email context is that the use of
heterophony was almost always a subordinate effect - while composers such
as Carter, from his Cello Sonata forward, are pervasively heterophonic, in
many other cases it would be necessary to cite measure numbers and parts to
really detail what is going on.  Never the less I will give this one a go:

The Post-Romantic use of heterophony is largely similar to Mahler's -
creation of heterophonic spaces within a polyphonic/homophonic context.
Strauss' passing phrases for example.  Examples of this sort are easy
enough to point out:  the opening bars of the 2nd movement of Debussy's La
Mer, Strauss' use of passing phrases, the first of Schoenberg's Five pieces
for orchestra.

A branch off of this road is the use of separation of voices by writing
lines which are highly dissonant to each other - if not in separate keys.
Havegal Brian's choral writing in his "Gothic" symphony is one place, and
the use of sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire another early example.  Examples
of "poly tonal" writing in Milhaud and Poulenc abound, and one can easily
see how what has been termed "dissonant counterpoint" is really a kind of
heterophonic counterpoint.  As Schoenberg himself pointed out "dissonant
counterpoint", like "atonal", is a contradiction in terms in a classical
context.  In this vein one can see how Sessions' 2nd Symphony, with its
obsessive setting of lines against each other, is heterphonic in this
regard.

Dissonant chords remember are better for producing separation of voices,
because the notes blend less.  It is easier to follow 5 lines that are
dissonant to each other than 4 that are mainly consonant.

For contrast the "Petit Concert" in Stravinski's Histoire du Soldat uses
heterphonic breaking, against frame shifting of different measure lengths.
A part with a consistent pulse slips in and out of phase with the general
progress of the rhtyhm.

The desire for separation of layers which prompted this move found an
earlier, and I believe more thorough going expression, in the work of
Charles Ives.  As has been recently documented, Ives did not turn to
heterophonic effects after having been an American trained in the German
style - rather he had gone to the Germanic style as a result of his
training at Yale, and had pursued with his father heterophonic effects
early on.

The "Unanswered Question" is a rather simple example of heterophonic
effects - the strings move in their own rhythmic and harmonic world, and
the horn in its, and the flutes in theirs.  They key to keeping them
separate is, of course, the internal unity of each of the parts - the
strings are a complete unit of their own.

The Fourth Symphony, with its many layers and offseting, is filled with
clear examples of heterophony - often four and five lines at once are
separated.  Ives uses differing rhythmic pulses to keep these lines
separate - one moving in 3, another in 5 and so on.  The phasing in and
out of heterophony is the structural device of the 2nd String Quartet.

 From Ives, I believe it can be shown, Carter takes his point of departure.
He continues however to integrate many of the "shifting frame size" effects
of the Second Vienna School into his work, and the result is "metrical
modulation" - shifting frame sizes within which heterophonic effects are
pursued.  It should be pointed out that this is the means by which Carter
avoids monotony in anti-tonal chord progressions - the rhtyhmic frame makes
the timing of the arrival of the next goal tone uncertain.  By the time of
his 4th string Quartet the players of the Juilliard Quartet commented they
had to relearn Quartet playing, since they had spent their lives learning
to listen to each other, and now had to ignore each other.

More recently one can hear this same kind of heterophony in Ade's opera
"Powder her face" - where rather standard styles are fragmented and shifted
from each other to produce heterophonic frame breaking.  Another example is
the Cello Concerto of Dutilleux, who often uses jazz rhtyhms in the strings
or bass line while the melodic line is progressing in a square beat of
classical music.

Pieces:

Debussy's La Mer, Havergal Brian's "Gothic" symphony, Schoenberg's Five
Pieces for Orchestra, Stravinski's Histoire du Soldat, Sessions' 2nd
Symphony, Ives 4th Symphony, 2nd String Quartet, "Unanswered Question",
Carter's String Quartets.

- - -

The is a second road into heterophonic effects is the drawing in of
musics from places other than those dominated by Catholic or Lutheran
church music.  The Church in the West settled on homphony and polyphony
as the approved forms, and being a major patron, and one that was notably
willing to take out its displeasure in extreme forms - these choices became
powerful stylistic norms.  Outside of the reach of the Western Church the
folk musics of Hungary and Yugoslavia and Rumania retained heterophonic
elements.  The music of Bartok is heavily influenced by these forms of
offseting.  I'd like to point out his own performances of the Violin
Sonatas as a good place to listen for the offseting of the two lines.
I am also thinking of some of his song settings, but I would have to look
those up at home, since Hungarian words do not readily leap to my memory.

Further afield influences from Gamelon, Arabic music and Indian Music also
often have the property of several modal lines going on at once, and each
of these lines progresses at its own pace, offset against the drone which
has its own internal rhythm.

 From these styles come the heterophonic effects in Hovhaness, though I
will say he's particularly inept with them most of the time, and Lou
Harrison's music - particularly his works for some melodic instrument -
flute, violin, guitar - and percussion.  A simple example is the Set for
Guitar and Percussion.

The driving engine of heterphony here is based on a different effect.
That of percussive versus melodic lines.  Melodic lines have their rhythm
driven by harmonic resolution, or modal equilibrium.  They are waves that
have the characteristic smoothness that allows them to be modeled by sin
waves.  Percussive effects have wave fronts which are not smooth, and
instead are more closely modeled by differential fractals - wavelets.
The audible difference between these two wave types was noted by Richard
Strauss.  In essence a sin wave and a fractal wave are audible
simultaneously and do not impinge on each other's context, because they
are different physically.  We have evolved to hear this physical difference
because it is useful to do so.  This is why drones, even though they are
physically sin waves - can be used - because after a time we percieve the
coming and going of the overtone series not as a sin wave, but closer to
the way we perceive wavelets.

This difference can then be used to separate lines.  Again Stravinski is
one example, but later music would go so much farther in this direction,
and Jazz would make a more thorough use of it than Western Classical music.
I think there are people better qualified to list the best recordings.

If you think about it, many of the forms of process music - Cage for
example - are attempts to enforce heterophony - his "Number" Pieces for
multiple players.

Pieces: Harrison - Set for Guitar and Percussion, Hovhaness - sens mesura
section of the Magnificat, Schulhoff - Concerto for Piano and Small
Orchestra, Varese - Ionization, Cage Four(2).

- - -

The last road into heterophony is the least explored, and, paradoxically,
the most Western of them - heterophonic effects in Western music are clear
in the Renaisance and before.  The tecnhiques of heterophony here did not
rely on dissonance, or percussive/melodic effects, but consonance and
phase.

If you think about it, a consonant chord sounds consonant because
the various waves line up, and therefore we hear them as "blending".
However if you offset these waves, there is a particular effect which is
neither dissonant - it isn't non-blending, nor is it consonant - we are
aware of the separation.  This pattern resembles an audibler version of
"interference" patterns that light waves make, though it is not the same
thing.

These effects are occasionally explored by minimalist composers, however,
there is a general absence of underlying theory, people use tape to create
phase effects, or offset to consonant patterns.  Electronic music also
often takes advantage of out of phase effects.

But because the effect is not really a physical one, but one based on the
internal timing of the listener, it is not essential to be static in the
pulse of the music - offseting lines by small amounts continuously will
allow the effect to become audible even in far more dynamic sound textures.

Phillip Glass often uses 2 v 4 v 6 as a means of producing these phase
effects - especially in his earlier operas.

It is here I'm going to sin and talk about my own music and its
relationship to the music of others.  Specifically minimalism(s).  Many
people who do not care for minimalism have commented they feel my music
is related to Glass and Reich.  And yet generally the reaction from fans
of minimalism to my music is highly negative.

This is because while I use many of the heterophonic effects - such as
phase, and consonant heterophony - instead of using strict rhythmical frame
works to produce this effect at even regular intervals, there is a far more
dynamic relationship between the voices - and the phase effect is used not
as a beat producing device - but a trope that "turns" the music.  Instead
of producing the regular pulsing motion which many people find soothing
and comforting - it produces an unstable surface.  One which is far more
unstable that the underlying material might suggest - the heterophonic
phase effects are, in effect, another whole series of voices, that have
have their own logic and progression.  To mention some specific pieces -
the first scherzo in the Quartet in F produces these effects by pulsating
the dominant key by chromatic steps, and holding a single line to the
previous key, or leave early for the next key.  The moment of shifting
against the static note which is now dissonant is the turning effect.

- - -

One of the great problems of heterophonic effects is not the effects
themselves - multiple rhythmic patterns, offseting, dissonance, phase -
but that the West has not had a theoretical grounding for them.  They
are generally just that - effects - rather than being seen as part of
a particular textural type that is as self-consistent as polyphony and
homophony.  Theory has its problems, but its use is to explain to someone
how to do their part as part of a whole ensemble.  Instead of achieving
heterophonic effects - what often happens is that people merely sound like
they aren't playing together in time.  Accidental heterophony is no more
attractive than the automotive kind.

Another problem with the acceptance of heterophony is that it is thought
of as recent, and therefore attached in people's minds to specifical styles
of music.  Styles which they may or may not care for.  When we look back
on the history of classical music in the west as a whole, we see that
heterophony is one of the subterreanan stories in it - present, welling
up here and there, but never placed on its own equal footing.  Chopin's 2
against 3 is a simple heterophonic effect, so are the cackling horns in
Mozart's Don Giovanni - but they have not, until recently, been thought of
in that way.

Part of this is that the effect of "unity" is one that is highly desired
in musical experience.  Steve talked about "transcendant" experiences.
Heterophony is as good for producing this experience as polyphony and
homphony - witness the use of drums in ceremonies - but bad heterophony
is as little use as bad polyphony.  We've had a great deal of this.
Heterophony was also hit upon as a device by people who wanted others to
pay lots of attention, to keep them off balance, and hence is associated
in people's minds with destabilising musical experience.

Stirling S Newberry
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