Chord of nature

In music, klang is a term used in English to denote the "chord of nature", particularly in mistaken references to Riemannian and Schenkerian theories. In German, Klang means "sound", "tone", "note", or "timbre"; a chord of three notes is called a Dreiklang, etc. Both Hugo Riemann and Heinrich Schenker refer to the theory of the chord of nature (which they recognize as a triad, a Dreiklang), but both reject the theory as a foundation of music because it fails to explain the minor triad. The theory of the chord of nature goes back to the discovery and the description of the harmonic partials (harmonic overtones) in the 17th century.

The word "klang" (or "clang") has often been used in English as a translation of the German Klang ("sound"), e.g. in the English translation of Riemann's Vereinfachte Harmonielehre. Among the few usages found in scholarly literature to denote the 'chord of nature', one may quote Ruth Solie, who speaks of "the major triad or Naturklang as found in the overtone series", or Benjamin Ayotte, who refers to an article by Oswald Jonas in 1937 which apparently makes use of the term.

The confusion by which the term has been used to denote a chord (instead of a complex sound) probably arises with Rameau's theory of Résonance. Rameau had misunderstood Joseph Sauveur's experiments, intended to demonstrate the existence of overtones, and believed that the harmonic partials arose from a resonance within the fundamental note, to which he gave the name corps sonore, often translated as Klang in German. As Henry Klumpenhouwer writes,

Almost all tonal theorists have proposed that triadic structure arises from a fundamental, conceptually anterior, constituent pitch – such as radix, son fondamental, Grundton, Hauptton – that exerts unity on the collection by means of an array of intervallic relationships sanctioned by Nature.

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