In this video we're going to talk about the onomatopoeic texture
from George Frederick McKay's book Creative Orchestration.
In that book he outlines eight different distinct orchestral textures.
And so in separate videos we're looking at what each texture is,
listening to an example from the repertoire, and then we're taking the
Breath of the Wild theme and applying that texture in orchestration to it.
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So onomatopoeia is when you have a word that represents sounds or an action in real life.
So for example the word "splash" or the word
"knock", that the word itself kind of sounds like the thing it's talking about.
In music that means that you're using music, you're using the
textures and colors of the orchestra, to represent sounds from the real world.
So it's a very common technique in film music.
A lot of cartoon scores or horror movies will use this technique.
You probably won't find as many examples of it in Classical music or jazz.
So film music is where most of your examples are going to come from.
But rather than pull from a film score, I actually tried to find something a little different.
So this is the second movement from Beethoven's sixth symphony.
Unlike most of Beethoven's symphonies, the sixth one is explicitly
programmatic which means that there's actually, like, a story happening to it.
And this movement itself is even called "By the brook."
So what we can see here is he has these woodwinds where he's even written in, in German but here I
translated to English, the names of the birds that these woodwinds are supposed to represent.
Using the orchestra to represent birds seem to be something a lot
of Classical composers really like to do, because I know
in the Spring movement from Vivaldi's four seasons he uses the violins to be the birds.
There's a movement in the Mother Goose Suite by Ravel where the
woodwinds are representing crows eating breadcrumbs.
Just birds seems to be a thing that people really like to use the orchestra for!
It's kind of unusual that he's even written in words what each of these birds is supposed to be,
because I don't really see how that helps the
player necessarily do anything differently than what's written.
So really all he's doing here is he's just using the woodwinds to echo
the call of that bird, the little song they might make.
And the three different birds have a different kind of sound.
It's really that simple, this is probably going to be a shorter video than most of the other ones.
And then that repeats there.
So it's very clear that those woodwind parts are not part of a main melodic line.
They're not developing a motive that we've heard earlier in the movement.
They're pretty isolated, just these bird calls.
So really the purpose here is just representing sounds from nature.
Trying to evoke that feeling.
Not any kind of melodic or harmonic device going on here.
It's just that representation of sound.
So usually what I've been doing with these videos is taking the theme and then applying the texture
to that theme, writing it, orchestrating it in that style.
This is not really how you would probably use the onomatopoeic texture in real life.
You wouldn't, maybe, take a melody and apply it to this texture.
It's just not what you're supposed to do.
You're trying to find a certain sound,
you'll come up with interesting creative ways to create that sound.
So what I think I'll do for this video is maybe use some of the motivic ideas and just come up
with something that's probably going to be kind of silly, but see if we can come up
with something that's just more sound effect than it is melodic or chordal or anything like that.
So first thing I'm going to do is pull up a piano,
which we'll use as our main sketch, and I'll keep this line here as my reference.
So I'm thinking what I could do on this opening is have this big dramatic
crash, like a jump scare kind of thing so maybe...
Let's get rid of that.
Maybe it will be very fast.
Let's do that, let's make the sixteenths.
And we'll make it, make the whole thing octaves.
Grab this another one, we'll make that dramatically loud.
This could be cool if this was like a big smashing timpanI roll.
So I'm going to even put that "timp", I'll put here "tutti" which means just everybody.
Maybe we'll have that roll.
Then maybe we go something quiet.
What if this was like sneaky plucky pizzicato strings?
It'll be kind of sneaky.
It'll feel like somebody's sneaking around.
Yeah why don't we accent.
I'll probably do it in a different octave but maybe we'll accent those with like a xylophone.
So I'm thinking this would be kind of like a cartoony kind of thing.
I'm picturing like a cartoon character kind of sneaking around to that.
And then let's make this simple.
Let's copy this over
Just make this instead of that it goes up to the Eb.
So this is the same thing we had before let's remember that that's massive
we're gonna accent that actually
Maybe this could be high tremolo violins, really really high.
Oops I don't want that,
harmonics on the violins.
And that again will be super quiet.
So like I said I thought this would be one of the shorter videos.
So now let's grab the instruments that we want for this
So this will become an exercise in copy pasting.
I'm actually going to mark all those guys as staccato just so it's super clear.
And maybe we'll accent this one and then this will be our timpanI.
All right let's hear that opening.
We don't want you.
All right so I want the xylophone. Pianissimo is good.
You are just the violins on pizzicato.
And then I'm gonna copy this all over, we could even copy one really high flute.
All right, so I want to slow this whole thing down a bit.
Maybe even down to 60 beats per minute.
What will this feel like on just this?
I want to ditch the piano as well.
All right I've got it cleaned up a little bit.
I fixed the roll, just wasn't sounding very good
at the slower tempo and I got rid of the instruments that we're not using.
And so here we go with the onomatopoeic texture.
Again this isn't how I would normally write this.
I wouldn't come from a melody and try to adapt it to this kind of sound effect thing.
Really I would just be like "What is the sound I'm trying to get to and how can I create it?"
But this was kind of fun and you can hear what the texture sounds like.
So the onomatopoeic texture is probably not one you're going to be reaching to
and grabbing for all the time, but it is one of the eight orchestral
textures from McKay's book so I wanted to make sure I included it.
Next time we'll have a texture that I think is a little more practical
and you will find yourself using a lot more often.