Klangfarbenmelodie (German for tone-color-melody) is a musical technique that involves breaking up a musical line or melody out from one instrument to between several instruments. It adds greater color and texture to a melodic line, instead of just one timbre in playing the line.

The term was coined by Arnold Schoenberg in his text on harmony, Harmonielehre (1911), where he actually discusses the creation of "timbre-structures", which, in Jim Samson's (1977) words, "successions of changing tone-colors might create independent formal shapes which might be organized in a manner analogous to pitch structure." He and Anton Webern are particularly noted for their use of the technique, Schoenberg most notably in the third of his Five Pieces for Orchestra (Op. 16):

and Webern in his Op. 10, a response to Schoenberg's Op. 16, and his Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24. Even his Op. 11 pieces for solo cello use harmonics, am Steg, pizzicato, and am Griffbrett in the opening bars, and his orchestration of the six-part ricecare from Bach's Musical Offering, "betrays the same preoccupation":

Klangfarbenmelodie in Webern's arrangement of Bach's Ricecar

This may be compared with Bach's open score of the subject and the traditional homogeneous timbre used in arrangements:

Bach's open score of his Ricercar subject

However, "To a marked degree the music of Debussy elevates timbre to an unprecedented structural status; already in Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune the color of flute and harp functions referentially," according to Samson. Another earlier use of this technique was used by Berlioz in the fourth movement of his Symphonie Fantastique, March to the Scaffold, in bars 109-112, where the short melody is passed between the strings and the winds several times.

Isao Tomita also uses the technique in his works, instead of musical instruments, he uses different synthesizer voices.

There is also a French term, mélodie de timbres, which means much the same and was used by Olivier Messiaen to describe his Couleurs de la cité céleste.

Frank Zappa also used the term "Klangfarbenmusik" about his instrumental piece Alien Orifice from the album Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Prevention

Source

• Samson, Jim (1977). Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900-1920. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-02193-9.