tone cluster

noun

, Music.

1. a group of adjacent notes played on a keyboard instrument typically with the fist, forearm, or elbow, similar groupings also occurring in orchestral music.

tone cluster

noun

1. music a group of adjacent notes played simultaneously, either in an orchestral score or, on the piano, by depressing a whole set of adjacent keys

Example Sentences

In “Let There Be Light,” Mr. Williams instead writes a swelling tone cluster of dissonant strings and wordless vocals, building an eerie tension that bursts and immediately recedes to a thick haze of high violins.

From New York Times

“They had to be able to name tone rows, or pick out a single note from a tone cluster. It was like an advanced-musicianship test from grad school.”

From The New Yorker

But a dense tone cluster of brass and Hammond organ interrupts this repose, and the music devolves into a buzzing, asynchronous mass.

From New York Times

But there were other, more dissonant motifs, like the clogged tone of a Kia horn, a truck’s blast, and my favorite discordant moment: the sickly tone cluster of an apparently ailing Camry horn, with its pitches drooping as the driver sustained it.

From New York Times

The array of sounds he divines from his Baldwin grand are beyond the reach of academic pianists; he caresses a note with the tremble of a bejeweled finger, then stomps it into its grave with a crash of elbow and forearm aimed with astonishing accuracy at a chromatic tone cluster an octave long.

From Time Magazine Archive