In this video I'm going to talk about the chordal
orchestral texture from George Frederick McKay's book Creative Orchestration,
In that book he outlines eight different orchestral textures
that are kind of distinct from each other.
I made a video introducing the idea, so please do check that out
and then for each of the different textures I'm making a distinct video
where I explain what the texture is, we look at an example from the repertoire, and then I'm
taking the Breath of the Wild theme and applying that orchestral texture to it.
So to make sure you catch when the next videos come out please
remember to subscribe and we'll get right into it.
So the chordal texture is, like I keep saying, kind of taking the monophonic texture ,which
is a single melodic line, and putting it into the third dimension or technicolor,
where you're adding harmonic tones and you're adding kind of the richness that
you get from chords that you don't get from just playing simple octaves.
But I think it's important to know that it doesn't mean that you have a melody
and then somebody else playing chords underneath.
You're still hearing the chordal texture as a single unit of sound.
So even when you have the chordal texture in the context of maybe some other lines going on,
that group of instruments can really be felt together functioning as a unit.
So balance is a really important thing to keep in mind for the chordal texture.
Usually you'll want to use colors that are either the same or really close.
So either maybe a group of trumpets, or just the strings,
or maybe just the woodwinds, which are harder to balance.
But that idea of balance and that it's meant to be
a single colorful rich unit of sound is really important.
For the idea of having a melody and then somebody else playing chords underneath,
that's more of the homophonic texture which we will cover in a different video.
So there are a lot of really nice examples in Tchaikovsky's
The Nutcracker of the chordal texture and I pulled out the March here for this example.
So the first thing to see is we have this top line which is in the clarinets
and the trumpets being doubled, and then there are chord tones underneath.
But there is a unity of rhythm.
Every time a chord tone is playing it's doing the
exact same rhythm and functioning with the same group as the melody.
Everybody is always together.
If you had any kind of separation in the rhythm, where maybe one
part was doubling with 16th notes, or sometimes the horns were holding out their notes longer,
you'd lose that sense of unity and it would feel like lots of different people playing the line.
And the chordal texture really depends on that this is just a single unit of sound I'm hearing.
But what I really like about this example is that it shows in a really short amount of space
you can have a lot of depth and do more than just copy paste chord tones underneath.
So you can see when we start we have two clarinets, two horns, and two trumpets playing.
And then by beat three he adds in two more horns,
so we're starting to get this kind of built-in crescendo.
No player is being told "play louder here."
They don't need to be, just adding in those two
extra horns is going to increase the sound just that little bit.
And then on the first beat of bar two the bassoon and the trombone just pop that B right there.
It's just this very subtle thing,
I think it stands out more in the MIDI playback than it does even in a real orchestral setting,
but again we're getting this kind of crescendo leading into that moment.
And then you can see that everybody who had not been present in the start
drops out for beat two and then those horns come back for the last beat.
So we get this kind of nice steady climb a little hit, duck, hit thing.
It really carves out a shape.
It's more, like I said, it's more than just copy-pasting,
letting everybody just do the whole thing.
There's really some intricate design going on here and it's really intentional.
And that's really one of the most important and powerful things about orchestration,
and why we like orchestral music is just that subtlety and that detail.
So listen to it here.
Listen for how there's this just very slight subtle crescendo,
and it adds just that extra little bit of breath and that extra bit of life to the phrase.
So if we're going to apply that same idea to the Breath of the Wild theme,
I'm trying to think in a unit of sound.
So I'm going to be going with close voicings, keeping it tight and trying to
maintain the chords that have already been written and decided by the composer here.
So I'm going to be kind of dropping voices from underneath the top.
Before I think about any kind of subtleties of "do I want to punctuate any moments," which
I'm not sure this one has that, I think just in the single line sketch I'm going to focus
on "what are the voicings going to be" and then we can decide who's going to play it.
I'm leaning towards doing a pretty simple three voice sound here.
So mostly what I'm going to be doing here is just reaching for
the next available chord tone under my melody.
So here the Eb would be under there, and then the C under there.
The G and the Eb.
Now in this case the next available chord tone below in the C minor is the G.
And because there's a third of a gap between that G and the Bb,
that to me I think is going to sound okay to keep the same.
I don't need to drop down any lower there.
There may be some notes coming up where it would be creating a second,
or it just wouldn't be really quite as smooth and we might need to make some different choices.
But here I think just keeping those guys is going to work perfectly fine.
So now for the next one, for the Ab, I have the seventh in the melody
and I could do the same thing here where I just drop down to the next available chord tone.
But the problem here is that I only have three voices.
And when you look at that, that's not an a flat major seven chord.
That's a C minor triad.
So what I'm going to do instead is omit the Eb, skip to the next one and go to the Ab.
Because that way even without the Eb that still sounds like an Ab major seven chord.
So let's just hear what we got so far.
All right so let's just continue in that same way.
What I'm not going to do here now is go to the F, because that's going to create a second.
It's just a dissonance that's really going to distract from my top line and I don't want that.
So I'm going to skip down to the next available tone which will be the C and the Ab.
Now by not including the F here I'm not entirely contradicting what I just said,
because when we play the rest of this measure there are going
to be opportunities for the rest of the chord tones to be heard.
The problem with not including an Ab here was that it's that dotted half note.
It's the entire chance that chord has to speak.
But here I don't need the F yet because I'm going to be able to have it right there.
And we could do it that way, that would be one way that that might work.
Let's just hear.
That could work.
Let's see how it sounds if we keep that Ab there.
I think because this is such a passing tone I actually don't mind the dissonance as much,
and to me that felt a little extreme, so I think I'm gonna stick with that.
That works for me.
Now let's go.
So here my thinking was the same.
I'm just dropping the next available chord tone.
This one I allowed just because it was on the eighth note,
but I think generally I'm going to probably not want to get too close.
That second up there.
So this should be pretty good.
And then this guy's going to be pretty similar to what we had already.
Oops.
Hm, let's see.
Well you're headed here, let's think about this one for a second.
We're headed here.
We're going to do the same thing, basically, that we did before, except it's an A natural.
So I might want to be able to stretch that spread a little bit to get there a little closer.
So maybe we're going to go with the C and Eb, that might work.
For the G, just to get there.
I'm trying to not make it feel too clunky and dropped in the outer voices.
I still want the voice, each instrument has to play this line, so I want it to be a line
that feels okay to play.
I'm slightly leaning towards actually.
That does not sound great, let's see.
No I don't like that, definitely not.
What if we try you.
We'll do that idea of just the next available chord tone.
Oh, duh. That's why that wasn't working.
Maybe I'll try this where I keep the G.
That's okay.
I think I kind of like this one.
And then I will have.
So where we're gonna end up is here.
We'll get there.
I'm going to anticipate.
Well I have to decide here, do I want
to extend the F a little late or do I want to get to the Gsus4 a little early.
So let me just think about that for a second, maybe running from here.
I think I'm gonna have you, I think I'm gonna have this guy be extending the F.
All right so here is the whole thing just in piano.
Obviously that will not tie.
All right so now I have to decide who do I want to play this.
I'm thinking we could make this maybe a little quieter.
The other monophonic version this was very big and loud at the beginning,
and it was trumpets, and I think in the
actual, you know, trailer version of this piece it's trumpets and it's very big and adventurous.
But that could be flutes.
Let's see what this sounds like just on three flutes.
We need some phrasing.
That won't work.
I think that's pretty cool on the flutes.
And then the only other thing I would do in a more realistic context, if I wasn't just doing,
you know, the rule "we're only allowed to use the chodal texture," is probably add in a bass line.
So maybe we could just add a clarinet to be playing that low tone underneath.
Especially because we're losing it like we're losing the F here.
So it might be nice.
I see, I hope it won't disrupt disrupt the balance too much to do that.
No.
Maybe we want... let's try.
I'm gonna keep him just right on the beat.
So let's take a listen to how that sounds,
just adding that low note underneath to ground the harmony a little bit.
Yeah, you know I think that especially helps on the chord exchange on the A minor seven to the F.
It lets you hear those distinct
chords that are happening there and like I said, you know, in a pure chordal world
okay we couldn't quite do that, but in a more realistic setting of course you can do that.
So I know I've said this a couple times,
but really the main thing I want to emphasize is how the chordal unit works as a unit.
It's a single rhythmic block, a group that functions kind of cohesively and then can be
isolated, reduced down to a single melody if you needed to, and expanded back up.
It kind of folds out.
It's not a melody and somebody playing chords underneath it.
And like you saw when I added the clarinet there,
it already was like okay well this isn't the chordal texture anymore, this is like a hybrid
texture where I have the chordal texture on the top and a single line on the bottom.
But, you know, the chordal texture really can be a lot of richness
and it can work for single units of time where you just have that.
If we went back and looked at the Scheherazade, I showed the example of that with the monophonic.
What follows immediately after the phrase that I played is a chordal texture unit in the woodwinds.
So that's it for the chordal texture.
There are seven others of these eight
orchestral textures from McKay's book Creative Orchestration .
So please subscribe so you catch when those are ready and I will see you in the next one!
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