In this video i'm going to talk about the polyrhythmic texture
from George Frederick McKay's book Creative Orchestration.
In that book he outlines eight different textures you can use when orchestrating your music.
Today we'll focus on the polyrhythmic,
and then for the seven other textures check out those seven other videos.
We'll start by looking at the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky and then we'll
take the Breath of the Wild theme and apply the polyrhythmic texture to it.
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Hey guys, welcome back to my channel!
My name is Ryan. I'm a composer for film, TV and video games,
and this channel is where I like to talk about how writing music works.
So the polyrhythmic texture is one of those ones that's a bit more like a fabric.
I think texture is really the right word for it here because it's not like a
melody and chords underneath it.
It's more of just kind of a massive sound, creating its own web.
In some ways it's a bit like the onomatopoeic one,
in which you wouldn't really apply a theme or a melody to it.
It's more of kind of a soundscape and in some other ways it's a bit like the polyphonic in
that you're kind of weaving these different elements together to create these layers.
So a great example of the polyrhythmic texture comes from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
You can see here, with the exception of the contrabass on the bottom,
this is entirely in the woodwinds.
You can already see, kind of, it's a complex mess of sounds.
There are one, two, three ,four, five, six, seven different things happening here and
all of them are more rhythmic and kind of motive based more than they are melody based.
These are not all like distinct tunes.
This is not really like the polythematic texture where we had a melody in one part
and kind of a contrasting or supporting melody in another part.
This is much more everybody's kind of doing their own distinct thing, and usually a simple thing.
And then when you just mash all of them together you get this really rich,
chaotic, interesting sound.
So the flutes and this clarinet in D are doing kind of the most distinct individualistic things.
And then the other clarinets and the bassoons and contrabassoon are doing
more simple ostinato based patterns.
So let's listen to those lower parts first.
So you can hear kind of the bottom layers and kind of the bed
that the other parts are sitting on top of.
You can hear it's very repetitive, I think you could call this an osinato.
It's intentionally a little dissonant and kind of grotesque in a way,
it's meant to be kind of ugly on purpose.
And then these upper parts are a little more fluid, a little more flowing
but still not exactly lines, not exactly phrases.
You can see like the top flute part here is a two bar phrase that repeats.
This other flute part is a little more fluid but
it's also about two bars that kind of repeat over and over.
Same with this clarinet in D, it's about a two bar idea that has some slight variations of plays.
So let's hear these top parts.
All the parts are very intentionally different from each other.
Whenever there's maybe space in one part another part is very busy.
It's all meant to be filling up with these many rhythms, just kind of this big, massive sound.
It's like a crowd of individuals making up the cacophony.
So now when we listen to everything all together you can hear even just
the individuality of these higher parts, although they can be heard,
are really meant to kind of just blend in to everything else.
The fact that these top parts are a little more fluid just adds kind of an
organic touch to it overall.
You still get this just kind of a soundscape, an ambience in a way, more than you do what
we've seen before maybe a melody with chords and harmony, and a little more traditional approach.
And I think it's important that we have that contrabass down there holding the Bb.
It adds kind of a ground that maybe without it things wouldn't quite have as much stability,
and maybe wouldn't even actually be quite as heavy.
But it does kind of help just give us some gravity and some stability on the bottom.
So now let's take the breath of the wild theme and see what we can do
with the polyrhythmic texture and apply it to it.
Similar to the onomatopoeic, this isn't really probably how I would approach this.
You wouldn't start with a melody and then kind of transform it into this rhythmic web fabric thing.
But just to keep consistent with this series I think I will take some of the motives from here
and see if we can create maybe a four to eight bar
texture web soundscape thing, layering different instruments and different parts on these motives.
So let's see.
I guess the main motives I'm going to be working with are this opening one,
which if you know the game that's actually a used motive in the piano already.
So maybe we'll do that in something other than piano.
And then we also have...
Maybe we can use that, and maybe we can use...
I don't know.
Let's see if we can layer these different things together.
So i'm gonna, instead of doing a piano sketch, because the whole point of this one is kind of the
fabric of different sounds working together, let's just add the instruments as we think of them.
So let's do a flute on top.
And we'll do this.
Maybe what we could do, take this and instead of repeating it exactly on the beat
we kind of shorten it a beat.
So that will give us some instability.
And then maybe we can even come back and kind of play with it a little bit and make some changes.
Maybe some runs or some just organic touches.
And now let's go down a layer.
How about the clarinet that we could maybe do that, might be good just going under.
Maybe we'll skip this first entrance of it.
So why don't we see if we can fill in this space with something.
Let's throw in an oboe.
Contrabass and the cello low C.
I'm going to make this whole thing a bit faster.
Let's add some strings.
See if we can add another little kind of ostinato part, maybe in between that.
Somewhere in there.
So thinking that just kind of fits in between with the clarinet here.
And notice I'm not really being all that careful or concerned about
the Bb and the C having that second there or being too dissonant.
Because again it's meant to be a bit of this kind of chaos,
a bit of this kind of craziness going on around us.
You can do maybe another part.
It's a little more flutes, maybe another another flute based on that.
What i'm doing right now is I'm just trying to think of ways to
get a little fluctuation and a little difference going through.
Let's add a bassoon part below that one clarinet we have.
If we just repeat that guy.
And then last thing I'm thinking I might do is
add a harp part that gives us just a little bit of kind of ticking the time away almost.
I'm thinking something just, like, really simple like that.
So some of these lower parts are like this.
So that was lower parts and then just the higher parts on their own.
So to keep this video from getting just insanely, crazy long I'm gonna stop here.
I think this is a pretty good way of just showing how you can take
little rhythmic pockets of moments and licks and motives throughout all the different
instruments, just give everybody kind of their own little part to focus on,
and then when they all play together you get this really interesting thick fabric.
And again I've been saying "soundscape."
Again, you're not going to use this with a theme.
This is not how you're going to kind of present your heroic main melody.
This is more when you want some sort of feeling and you can use,
you know, this is using basically a Cm7 chord.
It's got a touch of sadness but it's also pretty open and I think kind of warm and safe.
In a certain way the Stravinsky had,
you know, some chromatics and some intentional grotesqueness and dissonance.
This one is a little sweeter.
And you could do the same thing with a major chord.
You can push your soundscape with those different harmonies.
So let's listen to the whole polyrhythmic texture
based on motives from the Breath of the Wild theme.
So that is the polyrhythmic texture.
Like I said a few times, similar to the onomatopoeic video I probably wouldn't
approach this with a melody going in and then creating this fabric from it.
I would probably start a little more organically, just "What are some motives I
can use?" and not really worry about so much "What is the theme that this is based on?"
So if you've been following along with these videos as they come out you might
know that this is number seven and there's only one more to go.
So make sure you subscribe so you know when that one is ready and I will see you there!