When artists paint a picture they mix their paints to create a range of different colours. All they really need are three colours (red, blue, and yellow) with black and white to create any possible colour. Those source elements are brushed on the canvas in specific forms and structures to represent the picture that the artist wants to paint.
In music, we can look at the source elements as being the four dimensions of music covered above (Timbre, Pitch, Rhythm, Dynamics). Those are like the three coloured paints with black and white. They aren’t the artwork in themselves, but they’re used to create a range of material for the music to be built from. The musician then arranges these into forms and structures to create the music. The musician’s “canvas” is the span of time from the beginning to the end of the piece of music.
Horizontal and Vertical
When you’re scanning a painting from left to right, you’re looking at its horizontal axis. And if you look at it from top to bottom, you’re looking at its vertical axis. This creates, in the case of a painting, a two-dimensional picture.
Music also has a horizontal and vertical axis. At any given moment, there can be a whole bunch of things going on. You could have maybe a guitar, a keyboard, and a bass playing at a certain moment, playing certain pitches that form a certain chord. That is the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is then how the music moves forward through time.
These two axes—what’s going on in the moment and then how music is moving and changing through time—are ways for us to look at music when we’re Actively Listening to it: “What just happened in that moment, and then how did it change as it moved through time?” What happens in the moment is the vertical axis. How it changes over time is the horizontal axis.
How things change over time and the resulting structure of different sections is called “Form”. For example, you may have the chorus for 20 seconds. And then you have a verse for 20 seconds. Then another chorus. These are sections that proceed one after another, that follow each other through a span of time.
Sections are defined by how the musical elements are arranged within them, and the musical Form is created when these musical elements change from one section to the next. For example, the verse may be characterised by a low, rhythmic vocal line, a particular chord progression, played on acoustic guitar, sparse bassline and drums played with bundle sticks. Then the chorus arrives and the layers change, bringing in a new chord progression played on electric guitar, with a driving bassline and heavier drums.
All these different layers of what’s happening in any given moment is called the “Texture” of the music.
In the example illustration below, the top pitch contours might represent an oboe melody, the larger ones beneath the woodwind section and the strings, with the dotted lines beneath showing the double bass. Notice the repeated patterns along the horizontal axis—these are the sections of the Form. How the different sets of lines stack up within a section is the Texture.
Texture
Texture can be a revelation when you begin actively listening to music. When you ask your ear questions about Texture, you start to become aware of all the different elements that are stacked up in a piece of music.
People often use descriptive terms such as “dense”, “thick”, “sparse” or “ambient” to describe Texture. But these terms don’t help us much in translating what we hear into our own musical expression. While the texture of any musical moment can be as unique and individual as a fingerprint, learning about some broad categories of musical textures can assist you greatly when you want to “go deep” into your active listening—and in your own music creation.
Monophonic Texture
The word monophonic comes from Greek roots meaning “one voice”. We use the word “voice” here to include the voices of instruments as well as the human voice. So “a voice” could be one human voice singing a capella, or one Native American flute playing in a canyon. You only hear one thing going on at that particular moment. One note, one rhythm, one melody. One pitch on one instrument means one voice.
There’s no accompaniment or backing music. There’s just one musical line, moving through time.
Traditional Gregorian chant is another example of monophonic texture. This is an old form of church music and although you may have several people singing it together, they’re all singing the same pitches in the same rhythm at the same time. There’s no other accompaniment, traditionally, so that’s still considered “one voice” and a monophonic texture. Another example of monophonic texture would be a group of instrumental musicians all playing the same melody together, such as a class of children with recorders, all playing “Oh When The Saints”.
Polyphonic Texture
Polyphonic texture means having multiple voices. Most of the music we listen to can be called “polyphonic” because usually there’s more than just one voice present. In a typical band, you may have the bass playing one line. One guitar playing chords in a certain rhythm, with a second guitar playing lead lines. The drum set itself playing a whole combination of different patterns that are layered on top of each other. And then a lead vocalist over the top of it. We can call that a polyphonic texture. But let’s narrow it down a bit.
In a more strict sense, polyphonic texture refers to two or more melodies happening at once, where both of these melodies are of roughly equal importance.
A simple round, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is a good example. Multiple people sing the same melody but starting at different times, and it produces an overall piece which is polyphonic.
Polyphonic textures can be found frequently in classical music, especially from the middle ages up to the mid-1700s. For example, a Bach “two-part invention” has two melodies, one played by the right hand, one played by the left hand on piano. They’re both of equal importance, musically.
Sometimes you can find three, four, five, or even six melodies that weave together where one doesn’t necessarily pop out as the main melody. This is not nearly as common in our popular music today, although you can sometimes find examples of pop polyphony used for distinctive musical effect.
Homophonic Texture
What’s much more common in popular music is a particular kind of polyphonic music where there’s lots of things going on, but a melody which pops out as being the main voice. When one melody or one voice stands out as being the lead, in an otherwise-polyphonic texture, we call it homophonic music. This is the texture that most of us are most used to hearing in Western popular music.
Almost all popular music and most classical that we listen to in the Western world has one melody that is clearly sounds on top or in front, usually sung by the lead vocalist, or when there’s an instrument like a lead guitar or a lead synth which takes the main melody.
There can be all kinds of other things going on. All kinds of layers of sound, of synths, and drums, and guitars, and basses. But if there is one melody that pops out on top as the main, lead melody, we call that a homophonic texture.
Listening for Texture
Musical texture is extremely important and useful for Active Listening, because it takes you from hearing one big wash of sound to paying attention to all the layers that are in the music.
Most of the time, we have our greatest attention on the lead. The lead vocals, the lead instrument, the melody. We keep most of our attention there. But our Active Listening can be deepened considerably if we start to listen to the other layers in the texture.
As we touched on already in the section on Timbre above, one fun, easy, and extremely useful Active Listening technique is to choose a layer (or an instrument, since instruments are often assigned to a layer and stick to it) and to follow it with your ears throughout the song. Let’s say you choose the bass part and you follow that bass part with your ears. Or you choose the rhythm guitar part and you follow that.
“Going deep” in your listening is that easy! You will learn so much about music through this simple exercise, and build a much greater understanding of what to do when you’re playing—whether you’re jamming some cover tunes, rehearsing with your string quartet, or composing your next EDM masterpiece.
You can also start trying to stay aware of multiple voices at once. We might call this “listening vertically”. You may remember me mentioning in Chapter 3: Audiation that trying to follow all three voices at once in Quebe Sisters recordings (whether the three vocal parts or three fiddle parts) is still one of my favourite activities.
This kind of vertical listening “stretches” your ears and musical awareness in a particularly satisfying way, as you become aware of multiple voices in the texture simultaneously.
Form
As soon as you have two notes, one after another, you have a kind of musical Form. We can talk about musical Form from very small units like that, through to very large units such as the verse and chorus sections of a song, and everything in between. Here’s some vocabulary that will help you discern musical Form in your Active Listening:
- Motif: A small unit of melody, often less than half a dozen notes. Motifs can be repeated, varied, extended and generally remixed to build very large forms. Indeed, Ludwig van Beethoven spun out his entire Fifth Symphony from one simple motif: three short repeated notes and one long lower note.
- Phrase: Sometimes called a “musical sentence”. Phrases are sections of melody with a discernible beginning and end.
- Section: Musical sections can widely vary depending on the genre and type of musical piece. They are often marked by a decisive change in any combination of the musical dimensions and textures we’ve touched on so far. Sometimes these sections are labeled simply by numbers or letters, like “Section A”, “Section B”, etc. Other times they have specific names according to the genre. So in pop song form we talk about the “verse”, “chorus”, and “bridge”, for example. Rap often has a section called the “hook”. Classical sonata form has the “exposition”, “development”, “recapitulation”, and “coda”.
- Larger forms: in classical music you often find larger forms (such as Concertos and Symphonies) that include several movements. Each movement is a self-contained piece of music with a form of its own. Inspired by classical, some progressive rock bands have followed suit by extending into longer songs and even whole concept albums where the sequence of songs creates an inter-related structure.
Listening for Musical Form
Form is defined by repetition and change. This applies to any musical dimension or Texture.
For example, in standard pop song form you have three different sections: verse, chorus, and bridge. To these sections can be added a pre-chorus, intro and outro. When you’re listening to most popular music (including pop, country, R&B, a lot of hip-hop, rock and more) you’ll be able to tell these sections apart by comparing the melody and lyrics: the verses each have the same melody but different lyrics, each chorus has the same melody and lyrics (which are different to any of the verses).
Song form consists of a series of these different section types, such as:
Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus
Or a more varied form, still following the basic alternation of verses and choruses, such as:
Intro, Verse, Verse, Pre-chorus, Chorus, Verse, Pre-chorus, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Chorus
Even without knowing the details of these different types of song section, or the right terminology to use, you could begin to listen for (and even write down) the overall form of a song, just by noticing what changes and what stays the same in different parts of the song as you listen.
We’ll explore song form more in Chapter 16: Songwriting, including details on the commonly-used types of section and what you can listen for to identify the form of a song.
This kind of song form has been used for literally hundreds of thousands of songs since the middle of the 20th Century, and it’s built from folk music forms that have been around for thousands of years. Our ears have come to expect it, so when there’s a departure from it, it’s quite noticeable.
How Musical Elements Define Form in Different Genres
In the case of the song form above, we looked at just the melody and lyrics. But any musical element can be used to define sections in music. Any of these elements can then combine to form musical textures that change from one section to another. The changes in melody and lyrics described above are often accentuated by producers, songwriters, and artists by changes in chord progression, instrumentation, and texture.
Here are a few examples of other genres and how they create Form:
- Classical: Changes in key, rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, and even tempo are used to clearly define the sections of purely-instrumental pieces.
- Jazz: Performances frequently begin with playing the melody of a song, known as the “head”, followed by each musician improvising new melodies over the same chord progression. Each round of the chord progression is called the “chorus”. The performance typically concludes with a repeat of the head.
- Electronic Dance Music (EDM): In dubstep and dance music you typically have a section called the drop. This is where there’s a sudden deepening in the bass and a change in the rhythm that contrasts from the music that came before. Here you have a change in pitch and a change in the timbre of the instruments. A drop section is usually also instruments-only, so you’re typically moving from a vocal section to an instrumental section.
The Benefits of Listening for Form
Active Listening for musical Form helps us greatly with memorisation. If you know, for example, that a certain part is coming up, and it’s going to be the same chord progression as the previous section and then it’s going to repeat, or it’s going to do this or that differently than the time before, it’s far easier to assemble your mental model of the whole piece.
Active Listening for Form also helps in Playing By Ear. For example, if you understand that the same chorus is going to keep coming around, then you don’t have to figure out the chords each time they’re coming up because you already know them. The part you play during a verse might also be the same each time, or close to it. Suddenly there’s a lot less to work out!
Form is also hugely important for composers and songwriters. One common pitfall musicians face when they try to write music is that they try writing a song from beginning to end. They start with a great inspiration, but then they get stuck and can’t finish the song. Many simply don’t realise that their favourite songs have just two or three repeated sections. So if you simply repeat a section of music and then change the lyrics for the verses, keep the same lyrics each time for the choruses and you lay out these repeated sections in a predictable fashion, suddenly your song has practically written itself. All because you use a predetermined form.
Note this doesn’t mean you’re not being creative! In fact, it helps your creativity because you’re freed up to focus on what matters and you don’t have to create the form from scratch. Through Active Listening you can learn more and more about the nature of each section, and all the varied ways in which your favourite artists solve this musical problem.
Good musical forms are used again and again, and the listener doesn’t mind at all. The composer or songwriter can still be successful and tremendously creative, even while using only standard forms. For example in classical music, there is a form called “sonata form” which endured for centuries and is still used in composition today.
When we learn about, listen for, and understand musical Form, it both increases our appreciation for the music and the creative way in which that form is being used, and gives us tools to build our own musical compositions and better understand the music we’re playing.
Questions in Mind
Here are some questions you can use to explore Texture and Form.
Keep in mind that almost all questions can be asked for the whole piece of music overall, as well as for a particular instrument, a particular section, etc.
- What type of texture is it: monophonic (single voice), polyphonic (multiple independent voices), or homophonic (single “lead” voice supported by other voices)?
- What layers can I hear in the music, in terms of the melodic lines and harmony or in terms of the instrumentation?
- What is the form of this piece? How many different types of section can I identify and how do they repeat in a sequence? Are there standard labels I could apply to them?
- What changes (in any and all of the musical dimensions of Pitch, Rhythm, Timbre and Dynamics, as well as Texture) as the music moves from one phrase/section to another? What stays the same?
- How does this form compare to what’s expected in this genre? Is there anything unusual happening in terms of Form?
- Within a section, what’s the structure over time? e.g. how many lines in each verse, is there a pattern of call-and-response phrases, etc.
- How are repetition and change being used to define the form? What aspects of the music (e.g. Pitch, Rhythm, instrumentation, lyrics, etc.) are changing, and which are repeating within a section and across different sections?
- Can I identify any repeating motifs or melodic fragments? Are there musical patterns which multiple instruments/roles are playing at the same time, or one after another?
- What other music can I think of which has the same form as this and defines its form using the same kinds of repetition and change? (Bonus points for crossing genres!)