Texture

One thing I did while writing music at Berklee was write a piece of music that was almost wholly texture.

No melody.

I, like many other composers, have a tendency to focus my efforts on writing melodies and writing music that is melody heavy. This doesn’t need to be the case all of the time.

This limits what you’re writing and what you’re able to write. As a way to get out of this habit I tried to write music that was only texture. I even wrote a full orchestra piece that was entirely textural, and one of my teachers made a comment about it. You can hear it on my Soundcloud being performed by the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. They noticed that there was no melody. Which I took as a mission accomplished.

That piece actually ended up being performed by the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, conducted by Krist Kondakci, which was an amazing opportunity as a new composer at Berklee.

But I also like to think of it as validation that music can be very interesting as just textures. Depending on how you create those textures you can create some very interesting music.

One way to create textures is by layering small lines. Make one line only quarter notes. Make another line eighth notes. Make one more line that’s another rhythm; half notes, eighth note triplets, or dotted quarter notes. These lines should be simple, not melodies, and outlining some type of chord. That way you can create textures for some type of harmonic progression. As an idea have them alternate a chord tone and then a tension. Here are a few ideas; the root and the ninth, the third and the ninth, the fifth and the sixth, or the seventh and the sixth.

With major chords this will create a colorful sound.

There are tons of other ways to experiment with textures and creating different textures.

ISJ