What is Texture?
And why are the most available definitions so woefully unsatisfying?
At a session I supervised for my day job, the word ‘texture’ and its musical meaning arose as a discussion topic. Participants offered a range of answers, none of which fully satisfied me. The workshop leader demonstrated different ways of attacking a note on the violin, in response to which I thought, “no, that’s articulation”. But then he asked for my opinion, and I realized that I had no clue of what to say. What is texture in music? I have employed the term, but when forced to define it in words I came up empty. Much like with editing prose, I have a gut sense of what are correct and incorrect applications, but if somebody with minimal formal background in music (such as the participants in this workshop) asked me to explain why I feel so strongly one way or the other about people’s proffered thoughts, I would struggle mightily to explain.
Let’s investigate, starting as all thorough investigations do: with a cursory Google search.
BBC Edexcel:
“Texture describes how layers of sound within a piece of music interact.
Imagine that a piece of spaghetti is a melody line. One strand of spaghetti by itself is a single melody, as in a monophonic texture. Many of these strands interweaving with one another (like spaghetti on a plate) is a polyphonic texture. If all of these strands were placed directly on top of each other and all lined up (like spaghetti in a packet), they could move together in chords. This would be similar to a homophonic texture.
A unison texture is when all voices or instruments are singing or playing the same melodic line, so there is no harmony. It doesn’t matter which octave the melody is in - it is still a unison texture. An excellent example of unison texture is when everyone in a room (adults and children) sing Happy Birthday. Children and adults with higher voices will generally choose a higher octave than men with lower voices, but they are all singing the same melody.”
BBC Edexcel is targeted toward students preparing for their GCSEs, so it goes for a pared-down definition. Still, the idea presented to legions of young British musicians seems like a good place to start. Here, texture is exclusively determined by melody and the literal pitches being played in a piece. Immediately, we’ve unearthed an opposing notion to that heard in the workshop. The last two lines, about children and adults singing in unison, threatens to open an avenue of further discussion (how do octaves and differently-toned voices blend?), but quickly shuts it down.
Wikipedia:
“In music, texture is how the tempo and the melodic and harmonic materials are combined in a musical composition, determining the overall quality of the sound in a piece. The texture is often described in regard to the density, or thickness, and range, or width, between lowest and highest pitches, in relative terms as well as more specifically distinguished according to the number of voices, or parts, and the relationship between these voices. For example, a thick texture contains many ‘layers’ of instruments. One of these layers could be a string section or another brass. The thickness also is changed by the amount and the richness of the instruments playing the piece… A piece’s texture may be changed by the number and character of parts playing at once, the timbre of the instruments or voices playing these parts and the harmony, tempo, and rhythms used.”
The definition that your average Google searcher (hello!) will likely read prior to halting his hunt, somewhat satisfied. Wikipedia’s primary addition is a sparse framework for describing the feel of texture (thickness), beyond the technical composition of a texture explained by various -phonics. Wiki also references tempo as contributing to texture. The speed at which a piece moves is typically identical across an ensemble, so tempo is a new element distinct from the -phonics. The “richness of the instruments” invokes something like our initial example by reaching toward character, tone, breadth of articulation, and other intangible virtues of different noisemakers. Finally, the article later includes ‘Silence’ -- defined as “No sound at all or the absence of intended sound” -- in its table of common types (again, mostly -phonics) of texture. What is the texture of empty space?
Perennial Music and Arts:
“What images pop into your head when you hear the word “texture”? Soft or hard? Dry or wet? Alive or inanimate? Slimy? Sticky? Fur, skin, scales? How do these different textures translate into sound? How is texture used in music?
A piece of music (or a musical performance) is constructed of many building blocks. These include the melody or melodies, the harmonies, and the rhythms, as well as the form. When these different building blocks are brought together along with tempo and timbre, they create a musical texture. There are four types of textures that appear in music: Monophony, Polyphony, Homophony, and Heterophony.
Side note: Timbre is often called the “tone color” or “tone quality” of music. It is what distinguishes the different instruments or voices that are playing or singing the same frequency or musical pitch… Combining timbres is a very important aspect of creating musical textures that make one piece of music stand out from another.”
This general music education site uses the same categorization method as above, and also includes instrumental timbre as an element of texture. The difference in this definition is the preamble about physical textures which sets the stage for the musical discussion. Notably, a fourth site that I glanced at included a similar section about physical textures, but directed readers to cast out such thoughts lest they be led astray from the entirely unlike realm of musical texture. Conversely, Perennial Music and Arts invites its students to consider how physical sensations “translate into sound”.
My chief takeaway from this shallow dig is that the uncertainty surrounding this omnipresent term runs deep. I encountered general agreement that texture refers to the ways in which melodic instruments are layered, but beyond that facade of cooperation lies disarray. Does timbre affect texture? If it does, how does one account for it in the existing framework that categorizes based on pitch? (The same questions apply to tempo.) Different articles hint at less technical ways of describing texture, but do little to explain what the descriptors mean and how one might apply them.
Above all, none of it feels quite right to me. There’s that word again: feel. In common parlance, a texture is a feeling, something understood via touch. We have words that attempt to capture and convey that feeling, but all fall short of experiencing, in part because we all sense differently. I find green tea to be gently funky with a soothingly dense aroma; someone else might consider it bitter and olfactorily oppressive. Neither is right or wrong -- they just are. People feel sounds, too: nails on a chalkboard sound rough, scratchy, piercing, like sandpaper or a cheesegrater; hammering metal sounds heavy, smooth, sleek, like the surface of a car sitting in the showroom. When a breeze brushes through tall grass in a field, the sound conjures an image of the contact between swift, ephemeral air and paper-thin blades, scraping ever so lightly as their rough edges collide. And when a pick scrapes across a low guitar string, each individual bump as duralin edge bounces against tightly-wound criss-crossing wire is distinctly audible. There is a texture to that sound that has nothing to do with its place in a contrapuntal chorale. Then again, an articulative technique produces the effect.
In his 1989 article ‘Considerations of Texture’, musicologist Jonathan Dunsby introduces the illusional aspect of musical texture. The blending of distinct voices into the illusion of unison, such as the “move between the sustained amplitude of the voice and the radical decay of the piano”, or hearing a string quartet “as one instrument of giant range from low bass to high violin… the creation of a line out of lines.” Composition involves the attempt to create new types of sound, and the illusion stems from the listener’s awareness of the cause of that sound. (Here I think of the glorious moments in an improvisation when, while watching one side of the stage, I hear an alien sonority emerge from the other and whip my head around to see someone attacking an instrument [or tool, or piece of scrap] in a manner of which I had never conceived.) Dunsby starts from the four terms enumerated above, but widens these constraints using a combination of psychological analyses -- Leonard Meyer’s understanding of texture as the mind grouping “concurrent musical stimuli into simultaneous figures”, i.e. Dunsby’s ‘illusion’ -- and Lewis Rowell’s eight ‘textural values’.
Rowell defines textures as the “weave of the music”, to be conceived of either as its aesthetic surface or, more technically, as the combination of pitch (on the vertical axis) and time (horizontal). His values chart relative activity along these axes and categorizes combinations of notes into various antitheses, from the more concrete (chordal/linear, focus/interplay) to the abstract (simple/complex). Rowell innovates by allowing for subjective interpretations to mingle with BLANK. For example, whether a piece is driven more by linear melodic motion or vertical harmonic structures depends only on the relative presence of the two approaches. In contrast, the simple/complex antithesis is almost wholly dependent on the listener. Measures of judgement -- quantity of information, presence of patterns -- exist, but the ultimate determinant is the listener and their prior experience. “Each person has his own limits past which he will not willingly go, a point past which complexity is interpreted as chaos.” The mind attempts to make sense of sound, to isolate patterns and “fuse the data into a unified ‘surface.’”
In trying to make sense of all this, I have found it useful to imagine musical texture as a tapestry (“the weave of the music”). Picture a fabric comprised of so many threads of varying colors and materials strung up to form a pictorial illusion. Using the earlier spaghetti metaphor as a starting point, in our tapestry we can still see a solitary, unmolested monophonic thread running parallel to an overlapping cluster of threads forming a polyphony. But our strands can be so distinct from another. Different colors, directions, lengths, widths -- perhaps the weaver ran out of wool part way through and had to switch to cotton, and as a result some feel different to the touch than others, and likely smell different as well. Viewing it from the side, thicker or more densely woven strands might protrude like bulging, crooked clumps on an Anselm Kiefer canvas. And then, when you stand back and take it all in, you are suddenly presented with a unicorn, in all its calculated imperfections.
Medieval gourmands understood that the experience of a meal consists of far more than just the food consumed, and that the taste of that food, as well as the memory associated with it, relies equally on how the other senses are occupied. Music presented in person or as multimedia understands this as well, but listening to a recording alone is an experience unmoored from physical reality. All we have are the individual sounds, woven together to form an auditory illusion that we attempt to describe with touch-centric terminology. Our minds layer abstractions to render the initial abstraction -- sound divorced from visuals -- comprehensible. Using music theory to label notes, intervals, and chords provides a useful framework for technical analysis, but ‘minor third’ does little to describe the feeling of hearing that combination of pitches. Rowell reaches for ‘smooth/rough’ to describe the antithesis of legato and staccato textures and in doing so invokes the literal sense of running one’s hand across a textile or a marble statue. It’s a natural, seemingly inescapable allegory, and one that has proved intergenerationally useful for making sense of how something sounds. We cannot feel what we hear, but it feels like we can.
This piece was more of a personal exploration than anything, and I don’t think it’s right to argue for 2,000 word essays as GCSE definitions. But I do feel that the winnowing-down of texture to a technical term for melodic and harmonic movement deprives musicians of a great range of descriptive possibilities. Music can be so much more than sound and figured bass symbols if we let it be.
Reading Stanley Crouch discussing the different textures so deftly accessed on The Piano Scene of Ahmad Jamal inspired me to revisit this piece, because I had a sense of what I thought he meant, but I wanted to know. The pianist possessed an impeccable ear for balance, and varied textures in his arrangements by alternating single-note melodies with block chord passages and deep, plodding basslines. But when Crouch wrote about Jamal’s textural prodigiousness, he was not alluding to the contrast between monophonic and homophonic writing. Crouch meant the difference between the dense, clustered voicings on ‘Ahmad’s Blues’ and the airy, bell-like intervals on ‘Poinciana’ that imply all the tension of a single thread of silk and resolve before you realize that something was off. He meant the piercing octaves that shock you awake and the gargantuan range of force with which Jamal can attack the keys, sometimes hitting both ends of the scale within a single bar. Jamal lived on the smoother, ‘cool’ end of the jazz spectrum, but when it fit the tune, he could be seriously rough. From a distance, his tapestry forms a beautiful image, full of a broad spectrum of colors from muted blue-greens to shocking yellows but remarkably cohesive nonetheless. Yet running your hand across its surface would amount to a journey across the most diverse landscape, traversing fields, spanning gorges, fording meandering streams, and scaling jagged ridges. The foundation of all of which is, of course, a series of interlocking notes.
Dunsby, Jonathan, ‘Considerations of Texture’, Music & Letters, vol. 70, no. 1, 1989, pp. 46–57.
Rowell, Lewis Eugene, Thinking About Music: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music (Amherst, 1984).
Crouch, Stanley, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (New York, 2006).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z23cb82/revision/1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(music)
https://www.perennialmusicandarts.com/post/four-types-of-texture-in-music