In this video we're going to talk about a ninth bonus texture to George Frederick
McKay's eight orchestral textures from his book Creative Orchestration.
Today we're going to talk about hybrid textures, where you take one of the eight
textures and you pair it or match it up with one or more of the other textures.
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So this is going to be a lot shorter than some of the other videos.
Instead of going to an example from the repertoire and then writing a new orchestration of the Breath
of the Wild theme, I'm just going to take two different pairings of orchestrations that
we've already looked at in the other videos and see how they can be mashed up together.
So for this first one I've taken the chordal texture and the polyphonic texture and
mashed them together, put them into one single orchestration.
So the only change I made here is I took away the violin one
part that was playing the melody at the very top.
It was in unison with the flutes.
The only reason I took it out is just so you could more clearly hear the flutes and the
chordal texture there, but it would work really well to have it in just as well.
So if I was approaching this as a fresh orchestration and doing this for real,
I might be a little more conscious of overlaps and dissonances and places
where there might be clashes, but I didn't really worry about that here.
I really just went to the flute part from the other part and pasted it in here.
So there are a few moments where
you might have a second, like the C and this D here, that might rub a little bit.
Because the flutes and the strings are such different timbres, some of those passing rubs and
some of those moments that are kind of fleeting dissonances are actually not as much of a concern.
They're not going to really be bothering us because we're hearing the strings
as their distinct unit.
We're hearing the flutes as their distinct unit.
Each one has their texture going on and so they can be a little independent.
They can be doing their own thing as long as they're generally working towards the same goal.
So let's listen to how the flutes from the chordal texture
match with the lower strings from the polyphonic texture.
And now for the second example I've taken the heterophonic texture, which was the
simultaneous variations of the melody, matched that up with our polythematic orchestration,
where we had the main melody and the strings and then this kind of other theme,
this other line accompanying it in the trombones.
So I think this works pretty well because the heterophonic texture lets you dress up,
kind of re-costume your main melody without adding a lot of busyness in
other registers and kind of all over the place.
So there's still room for the elements of the polythematic
texture to cut through and be pretty well heard.
So if we look at the flute, the glockenspiel,
and the violin 1 and violin 2, that's coming from the heterophonic texture of our main
melody and just kind of variations of it happening at the same time.
And then the lower strings and the timpani and the trombone were in our polythematic.
These other themes, these other ideas happening
not quite in contrast but also not quite in unison or in unity with our main melody either.
So really what this does for us, by allowing this hybrid texture of the
polythematic with the heterophonic on top, is to take that polythematic kind of upper level.
It adds another layer of complexity, another layer of richness and just
kind of makes the whole thing a little more organic and more alive.
All right, so I told you this was going to be a shorter one.
Those are two examples of hybrid textures where we took some of the eight orchestral textures
from before, mixed and matched them, put them together, and got new results.
There's just one more video left in this series
where i'm going to take the orchestrations of the Breath of the Wild theme that we did
in each of the different textures and just play them back one by one, all together.
Takes about two minutes and you can hear all the different textures and
how one theme can be presented in some very different ways.
So please subscribe so you know when that one's ready to go and then leave a comment
letting me know which of the eight orchestral textures has been the most interesting to you
and was maybe a new sound that you hadn't really thought of before.
Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one!