Texture is a word carefully defined in music, and it doesn’t necessarily mean what one might think. In music, texture is the way all elements present relate to each other. Historically this would mean the way melodic lines combine to form patterns. When a melody is imitated by a following voice, we call the texture canon. When a short melody is passed around to all voices or parts, we call the texture fugal. When all voices move in the same rhythm, each with slight independence but working together to create a chord progression, we call the texture homophonic.
It is clear from even a short description of the sort provided that relationship of parts is a key ingredient in creating impact. Everyone moving together in a common rhythm will create one sort of energy, while more independent rhythms of separate lines creates another.
When I write of the energy contributed to the musical whole by individual parameters—loudness, melody, rhythm, etc.—I am implicitly referring to how one parameter alters the impact of others. As I have stated in this blog, melody itself is a relationship of pitch and rhythm. Beyond that, a primary outcome of the relationship created by combining two melodies is harmony (again, rather technically defined as the sounding of two or more pitches together, not necessarily harmonious). We have developed a set of expectations based on this relationship: generally, when two pitches create a disturbed energy in their combined sound (i.e., dissonance), we expect that movement of one or both will be to a place where the combined sound, or harmonic interval, is less disturbed, more peaceful (i.e., consonant). Of course these are conventions that have been settled on over time, creating the rules of harmony and counterpoint in western classical music by composers who gradually defined an era’s preferences, and these conventions create expectations of how the music will continue. Expectation is mental energy, and how it is met creates yet another(satisfaction, frustration, delight, irritation). Clearly there is harmonic energy produced by the relationship of pitches. That energy can be seriously altered by how fast the music is delivered, how loud or soft we play the dissonance or its resolution, the timbre of each part, and so on.
In music, there is always more: if we’re talking about combining two melodies, the relationship might be defined by sharing material, whether trading material back and forth, one line copying what the other has done, both delivering the same melody at the same time… the list goes on and on. You can tell from even such a beginning, short list that such relationship involves memory. It also involves allowing time/space for the other part to be heard, or, dramatically, not to do so! Lots of energy can come from the relationship of two lines or parts, and it gets even more complicated when more parts are involved.
Texture is in essence relationship, and I believe that it is one of the great sources of internal (mental) musical energy. Humans, living things in general, are very much concerned with relationship, so it seems clear that the multitude of relationships music delivers is one of the primary sources of what we call emotion in music. Texture can be described by the elements that comprise it—that’s external musical energy—while the internal energy that it spurs is so dependent upon the listener’s musical experience that it defies accurate prediction.
Our lives are full of relationships, music is full of relationships. For many reasons, it only makes sense that the energy of our various experiences of relationship—whether with other people, loud sounds, water: anything our minds and bodies might have endured—would find correspondence and meaning in the relationships carried by sound in music.