Texture (music)
In music, the word texture is often used in a rather vague way in reference to the overall sound of a piece of music. A piece may be described as having a "thick" texture, or a "light" texture, or other terms taken from outside of music (Aaron Copland's more popular pieces are described as having an "open" texture). The perceived texture of a piece can be affected by the number of parts playing at once, the timbre of the instruments playing these parts and the harmony and rhythms used, among other things.There are more precise terms which describe the number and relationships between voices:
- Monophony (base musical texture) is music with just one part (such as Gregorian chant). According to Adris Butterfield (1997), monophony, "is the dominant mode of the European vernacular genres as well as of Latin song...in polyphonic works, it remains a central compositional principle."
- Heterophony is a kind of complex monophony - there is only one melody, but multiple voices each of which play the melody differently.
- Polyphony is music with several parts, each independent but related and each as important as the others - none of them are merely accompaniment.
- Homophony is music in which the top part has a dominant melody and other parts are subserviant to it, moving in the same rhythm.
- Monody is 17th century Italian song with a dominant melody and a separate accompaniment.
A simultaneity is more than one complete musical texture occurring at the same time, rather than in succession.
A more recent type of texture first used by Gyorgy Ligeti is micropolyphony.
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