Sonoristics or sonoristic technique / Sonorism

This pair of related terms originates from the French language (sonore) and is connected with the explorations of sound in 20th-century music. The term sonoristics was created by the Polish music theorist Józef M. Chomiński. His original definition describes sonoristics as a technique, the essence of which is to "focus on purely sonorous values as the main means of expression, and thus a structural element of a composition". These means that in sonoristic music the dominance of timbral and textural concerns prevail, while questions of pitch are pushed into the background. Sonoristic devices include e.g. tone clusters and glissandi of various types, extended instrumental and vocal techniques, non-traditional approaches to musical time and rhythm, using sound masses etc. On the other hand, sonorism can be defined as a trend in contemporary music, avant-garde oriented, typical of Polish music in the 1960s and often associated with the so-called "Polish School of Composition". It was noted that Polish composers adopted sonoristic devices both with uncompromising logic and with full consciousness of the distinctiveness of their own proposals.