Page 62 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 3.11
Seating plan of a symphony orchestra <
Percussion
Timpani
Harps
French horns
Clarinets
Flutes
Second violins
Trumpets
Bassoons Tuba
Oboes
Violas
Trombones
Piano
Double basses
Cellos
First violins
Conductor
Texture
listen to . . . a podcast about texture online.
When a painter or weaver arranges material on a canvas or loom, he or she creates a texture: texture is the density and arrangement of artistic elements. Look at Vincent van Gogh’s Branch of an Almond Tree in Blossom (1890), shown on this chapter’s opening page. Here the painter has used lines and spaces to create a texture heavy at the bottom but light at the top, projecting an image that is well grounded but airy. So, too, a composer creates effects with musical lines—also called parts or voices, even though they might not be sung. There are three primary textures in music, depend- ing on the number of voices involved: monophonic, homophonic, and polyphonic.
Monophony is the easiest texture to hear. As its name meaning “one sound- ing” indicates, monophony is a single line of music, with no harmony. When you sing by yourself, or play the flute or trumpet, for example, you are creating mono- phonic music. When a group of men (or women) sings the same pitches together, they are singing in unison. Unison singing is monophonic singing. Even when men and women sing together, doubling pitches at the octave, the texture is still mono- phonic. When we sing “Happy Birthday” with our friends at a party, for example, we are singing in monophony. Monophonic texture is the sparsest of all musical textures. Beethoven uses it for the famous duh-duh-duh-DUHHH opening of his Symphony No. 5 (first Listening Cue, Chapter 1) to create a lean, sinewy effect.
Homophony means “same sounding.” In this texture the voices, or lines, all move together to new pitches at roughly the same time. The most common type of homophonic texture is tune plus chordal accompaniment. Notice in
40 chapter three color, texture, and form
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