[trio playing] texture refers to the relationship of voices and instruments in an ensemble. Its the way theyre blended together into a musical whole. [low hum and sticks clacking] [cultural music montage] what id like to do now is start with the tenor section, then the alto and the soprano, and then ill add the bass. One, two, three, and jesus is a rock in a weary land. narrator the subject of musical texture raises a number of questions. How are the different voices or instruments in a performance put together and organized . Lets add the altos, altos, tenor, and bass, ready jesus is a rock in a weary land. narrator how many parts are there . Does one voice or melody stand out . How do the various parts relate to each other . One more time, without piano. Jesus is a rock in a weary land. man any music is a set of preferences, we like it like that. This is how we think things go together, okay. And people really have strong preferences in terms of Something Like texture. There are larg
How the pitches relate to each other is defined in western music theory as harmony. man to me, harmony is similar to the spice that you use when youre creating a sauce. Youve got a melody. There are many different ways you can harmonize the same melody, and the way you choose to harmonize it is what will give you a different emotional response. So in that sense, i really feel that the harmony is responsible for how a melody makes you feel. [low hum and sticks clacking] [cultural music montage] [keyboard plays light jazz music] man harmony can best be described as notes sounding together in combination; pitches that are stacked on top of one another. If we hear only a melody by itself, with no harmonic accompaniment, it might sound Something Like this. [plays melody line from we three kings] now if we hear an accompaniment to it, this would be considered harmonizing the melody. This hand is going to play the harmonic accompaniment. This hand will play the melody again. man if you look a
Funding for this program was provided by the Annenberg Cpb project. [spirited piano melody] male narrator there are as many ways to approach the creation of music as there are creative artists. [jazzy saxophone music] the process falls on a continuum between improvisation, musical creation that takes place during performance, [banjo plucking] pretty polly. And composition, musical creation conceived before performance. Compositions are preserved, either through memory or notation, so that they can be repeated over and over again. leek a composers role, i think, is to provide enough information to pass on to performers what they would like recreated in sound. [traditional arabic music played on the oud] shaheen the idea behind improvisation is to create an instant composition without preparing it or preconceive it as composition. Its a composition that is being composed on the spot. [sticks clacking] [cultural music montage] [rock music] dispirito i think that composing and improvising
slobin technology has become quite decisive for world musicmaking since the advent of the Industrial Age in a few key ways. One is the creation of new instrument types that simply couldnt be built before. The modern piano depends on high steel techniques that just simply werent available until a certain point in the 19th century. Instruments like the modern saxophone, the modern flute these are all hightech in a 19th century way. [screeching, reverberating cymbal crash] another way in which technology has become decisive is in the invention of sound reproduction. It simply was the case that before about 1890, music vanished into the air. You had to remember the way somebody played something that you heard once in your life because you would never hear that again. Once you could reproduce that sound, you could stockpile it because of the technology of reproduction. This is a profound and deepranging change that happened to music after a million years of human existence. [static] [muffle
That are in love with each other. [low hum and sticks clacking] [cultural music montage] narrator all over the world with instruments and voice, people create an uncountable number of melodies in an enormous variety of styles. The methods in which a musical culture generates its melodic forms depend on the musical rules and practices of that culture. These rules are employed by composers and performers, and are implicitly understood by listeners as well. That baby boy i never saw before. narrator but at the basis of all melodic form is the concept of vibrational frequency or pitch. [low, airy pipe plays] man pitch is the highness or lowness of the sound. Its a matter of how many vibrations per second form the fundamental frequency of the sound. For the musician, of course, the pitch at least in the western vocabulary, are the 12 pitches of the octave divided up, and heres a chromatic scale, and thats all we have each of those pitches or pitch classes from c to c is reproduced in every