Hi. In this film, I'm going to try and answer a question that's been put to us about texture. What is texture in music?
It's a word we use about all sorts of things, isn't it? You might use the word texture in relation to painting, for example. You might even use the word in relation to cooking.
So what does it mean in music? Well, maybe a basic definition is that it's really all about how is sound? organised.
So for example, I could have a piece of music that just has a single line. So maybe just an unaccompanied folk melody or something that maybe monks or nuns might sing as an unaccompanied line. And we would say that that is a monophonic texture.
In other words, there's just one sound going on. Whereas this would be an example of a two-part texture. Because I've got one set of notes going in one hand, another set of notes going in the other hand. So that's a two-part texture.
If I play something like this, here's a four-part texture. But I might have a much thicker texture. So if I've got lots of notes, here's an example of a thick texture.. So once I'm building chords with six, seven, eight different sounds going on at the same time, then I might describe that as a thick texture.
So you can use words like thick or thin texture. So that's one way in which we could talk about our texture. Obviously, we've got more obvious things like high and low. You know, here's a high texture. Here's a low texture.
I may have a widely spaced texture, where I've got one part very high, one part very low. Or I may have a very kind of tightly packed texture, where maybe I've got quite a few notes, but they're all quite close together. Or you could say that that texture is very much concentrated in the middle of the piano, whereas the previous texture was a very widely spaced texture.
So you see, texture has anything to do with how sound is organised. Now, we also have words that we use like homophonic and polyphonic. So if you have a homophonic texture, It's basically that the chords are organised this way, that your music is organised vertically. So if I go from one chord to another like this. You can hear I've got a tune at the top of that texture, but really the texture is going from this chord to that chord to that chord.
So if it's basically organised in that vertical way, we say it's. whereas if we have one line kind of copying another line, maybe just imitating it a little bit apart, then we could say that that's a polyphonic texture. So if I do something like this.
Can you see what happens here, or hear what happens there? One part begins, another part. kind of copies it.
It may be copied exactly, or it may be kind of imitated slightly more loosely. But what we hear there is one line kind of going horizontally, and then another line joining it, also going horizontally. And it might be two-part polyphonic music as it was there, or it might be three-part, four-part, five-part polyphonic music.
So thinking about whether the music is homophonic or polyphonic or when those changes are coming about, thinking about high, low, thick, thin, textures that are basically block chords. We describe that as a block chord texture because it's just one chord after another chord. Or you may hear a chordal texture which is basically a homophonic texture. that has a melody at the top of it, then you could say it's a texture which is melody and a complement.
So. Or you may find that the texture is more broken up, so I've got a broken chord texture. So it could be something like this, same kind of piece, but.
Now that's still a homophonic piece because it's still basically organised in chords, but all I'm doing this time, instead of having block chords underneath that melody, I've got these notes that are kind of broken up a little bit. Or I might have a homophonic texture, which is all arpeggiated. So that's still homophonic, it's still chordal, but I've got arpeggios running through the accompaniment this time. So lots of different ways of organising a texture. You might also want to say where a melody is in the texture.
Is it at the top of the texture, as it was on that occasion, or maybe it's in the bass. You can see what I'm doing there, that's another homophonic texture, but the melody's at the bottom of the texture, and the right hand is doing a kind of repeated chord accompaniment. So anyway, the purpose of this is just to kind of get us into understanding the wood. texture and to understand different ways in which we might talk about it, different ways in which it might be organised.
There's much more to say about texture, but I hope at least that kind of launches some thinking that might be helpful.