Texture

A fabric can be smooth or woven, thin or dense, and you notice it before you count the threads. Music is similar. One person singing alone, a choir singing a hymn and four voices singing a round sound different before you even hear which melody is which. That quality is texture.

In music, texture is the overall effect of the interactions among melody, rhythm, timbre and harmony. A few terms classify the commonest textures: monophony, homophony and polyphony, along with heterophony and cacophony (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1).

Monophony

Monophony is music of a single line, performed by one voice or by many (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1):

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When it is one voice or instrument alone, it is a solo: the saxophonist on the street corner, the cantor intoning a psalm. When several voices or instruments play the same line, it is a unison: the first violin section, the congregation answering the priest (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1). Either way the texture is monophonic, because there is only one line.

Homophony

When there is more than one line, the texture can be homophonic or polyphonic. Homophony comes in two main forms (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1).

Rhythmic unison, or homorhythm. Melody and harmony move together in time: all the voices have much the same rhythm, even though the melody is in only one of them and the others supply harmony. It is the sound of a hymn sung in four parts, or of a Bach chorale (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1):

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Melody and accompaniment. The melody predominates and the accompaniment is clearly secondary. It is the folk singer strumming a guitar, the pianist with the melody in one hand and broken chords in the other (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1):

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On top, the melody; below, the chords of C, G and C broken into eighth notes. The accompaniment moves, but nobody mistakes which staff is the song.

Polyphony

Music is polyphonic when there are two or more voices of equal, or nearly equal, importance. The lines are presented so that it is hard to tell which is primary and which subordinate (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1).

The most familiar example is a round. Blatter uses "Frère Jacques": once every group has come in, you cannot say which is the most important, and the listener hears several melodies competing for attention, even though they are all the same melody started at different moments (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1). The first voice, and the second coming in two bars later:

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In the third bar the first voice climbs E, F, G while the second begins C, D, E, C. Both are complete melodies, and both sound like it. Polyphony usually grows out of the techniques of counterpoint.

Combined textures

Many pieces have a main melody, clearly the most important, and other lines that gain importance from time to time. Blatter's example is the end of Sousa's march The Stars and Stripes Forever, where you hear at once a brass countermelody, a high piccolo solo, and the rest of the band with the theme, harmony, bass and rhythmic accompaniment (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1). It is a homophonic texture with traces of polyphony.

Heterophony and cacophony

Heterophony is more common in traditional and folk musics. Two or more people play or sing the same melody at almost the same time, but each with small differences of tempo, rhythm or ornament. It is what happens when a stadium sings the anthem, or when two or three jazz players play the same tune together, each in their own way (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1):

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Hear the passage

The same line, with a small ornament in one voice. Sounding together, the two make neither harmony nor counterpoint: they make one melody with blurred edges.

Cacophony is the term for sounds that seem to have no organisation at all. Blatter notes that it is almost always used pejoratively, to dismiss music that is too complex or unfamiliar for the listener (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1).

One piece, several textures

Some pieces in well-defined styles use one or two textures, such as a hymn whose verse is sung by a lone voice and whose refrain has a strummed guitar accompaniment: monophony, then homophony. But very few large pieces keep a single texture from beginning to end, and even those that seem to usually have details that take them out of the category (Blatter 2007, part 5, art. 1).

Textures are, in the end, a way of listening. The question is always the same: how many lines are sounding, and which of them, if any, is in charge?

What comes next

Polyphony leads straight to counterpoint, the art of writing simultaneous, independent melodies, and to its strictest forms, imitation and the canon.