Steve PMHAlso known as homophony, the homophonic texture is the most widespread type of texture you can find in modern-day Western music. It’s present in the majority of songs you hear on the radio, music played in movies, jazz, pop, rock, and the bulk of last century’s classical music.
Some of the other main types of texture are monophonic and polyphonic, but in this article, we’ll be answering the question: what is homophonic in music? So keep reading if you want to fully explore that musical term, learn about its history, and go through a few examples to better explain it.
What does Homophonic Mean in Music?
In music, a homophonic texture is when you have one melodic line (the line that captures your attention naturally), while the rest of the parts accompany or simply fill in the chords.
In other words, when a primary part is supported by one or more strands to add detail and complete the harmony, this is called a homophonic texture.
The term homophonic originates from the Greek words ‘homo’, which means “same” or “similar”, and ‘phonic’, which means “sound” or “voice”.
Explaining Homophonic Texture in Music
As defined above, a homophonic texture in music is where a single melody is the main idea while the other parts provide an elaborate accompaniment or play individual notes.
In a lot of well-written homophonic pieces, the parts that aren’t the main melody often sound quite different and can be interesting to listen to on their own. But when these parts occur along with the melody, you can clearly tell they aren’t independent either because they serve to fill in the harmony or because their rhythm is the same as the melody.
Before I dive any deeper, and to really understand what homophony means, I should first explain what texture in music means.
What is Texture?
Texture, in music, is the way the melody, rhythm, and harmony are combined in a composition. The manner of such a combination determines the overall quality of the sound in a piece of music.
Musical texture is usually described in relative terms such as the density (or thickness) and range (or width) between the lowest and highest pitches. It’s even more specifically differentiated in regard to the number of parts or voices, as well as the relationship between these parts.
In other words, you can think of texture as the number of layers of melody and harmony that you can simultaneously hear in a piece. For example, a thick texture consists of many layers of instruments.
Types of Texture
As per the explanation above, you can say that a piece of music has a dense or scattered texture, a thick or thin texture, a wide or narrow texture, and so on. But are there different types of texture in music?
Well, the answer is yes. There are several types of texture in the fields of music analysis and history. These include monophonic, polyphonic, homophonic, and heterophonic.
To help you better understand homophony, I want to quickly go over monophonic and polyphonic textures.
- Monophonic texture —such music contains only one melodic line. There’s no harmony or counterpoint. It’s also called monophony.
- Examples of monophonic music include one person whistling a tune, some people singing a song together without harmonies or instruments, and a single bugle sounding “Taps”.
- Polyphonic texture —this music is also referred to as polyphony, counterpoint, or contrapuntal music. If a piece of music is polyphonic, this means it has more than one independent melody playing at the same time. Even if there’s only one melody, the parts still sound independent if different people are causing it to occur at different times.
- Examples of polyphonic music include rounds, canons, fugues, Baroque music, as well as most music made by large instrumental groups like bands or orchestras (at least a section of the piece).
What is an example of a Homophonic Texture?
As I mentioned earlier, the homophonic texture is the most common texture in Western music. So, there are plenty of examples to go around.
Homophonic texture shares a similarity with monophonic texture as they both contain one main melody occurring. But the former throws in extra harmonies and accompaniment to flesh out the melody.
From here, we can conclude that music is called homophonic when it has multiple different notes occurring, but they’re all playing around one central melody. Now, let’s take a look at a few examples of homophonic texture:
- A pop or rock singer singing a song while accompanied by piano playing, strumming chords, or guitar picking.
- A trumpet player playing a solo during a jazz concert while the piano, drums, and bass are being played in the background.
- A violinist playing a solo melody line while the rest of the band plays in the background.
Types of Homophonic Texture
Since the homophonic texture is so common in Western music, different subtypes have emerged over time. The two main ones are homorhythmic texture and melody-dominated texture, let’s discuss them below:
Homorhythmic Texture
A piece of music is said to have a homorhythmic texture when all parts of its melody and harmony have the same exact rhythm. Also referred to as block chord texture, you can often find homophony in hymns, choral music, barbershop quartets, as well as a lot of instrumental music.
Examples
- The choral part of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ – Handel
- The opening to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – Queen
- The opening to ‘Carry on Wayward Son’ – Kansas
- The opening to ‘Some Nights’ – Fun
- ‘The Rite of Spring’ – Stravinsky’s ballet piece
- ‘Clair de Lune’ – Debussy
Melody-Dominated Texture
Moving on to the second type of homophony, melody-dominated texture refers to any other piece of homophonic music that doesn’t classify as block chord texture.
Here, like any homophonic piece of music, a single melody predominates while the harmony acts to flesh out and support. However, you’ll find that the harmony doesn’t perfectly match the melody’s lineup.
Example
A common example of melody-dominated texture is when a vocalist sings a melody while playing a piano or guitar as accompaniment. To clear this up more, consider Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’.
Only one melody is played and the harmonies are occurring around it, but the piano harmonies have a different rhythm than the artist’s singing. This means that the texture can’t be homorhythmic and is, in fact, melody-dominated.
Styles
In melody-dominated texture, the accompaniment of a piece is typically in one of the following three styles:
- Block Chord Accompaniment —block chords are the same as in homorhythmic texture, but here only the accompaniment part of the music piece is in block chords, not the melody as well. For example, ‘Prelude in E Minor’ by Chopin.
- Broken Chord Accompaniment — also known as arpeggiated chords, this is when the part played to flesh out the melody is broken up so that each note occurs at a separate time. Once again, you can hear this perfectly in ‘Someone Like You’ by Adele, where each piano chord is played one note at a time, not multiple notes at the same time.
- Alberti Bass Accompaniment —the Alberti bass accompaniment is considered a subtype of broken chords, but we’ll talk about it separately to avoid confusion (this topic certainly doesn’t need any more of that!). Here, each note of the chord is played at a different time following a “low-high-middle-high” pattern.
As such, the lowest note of the chord occurs first, followed by the highest note, then the middle note, and finally, the highest note occurs again.
You can find an excellent example of all three accompaniment styles in the opening of Mozart’s piano sonata as follows:
- At the beginning (the first 3 seconds), you can hear the Alberti bass type of accompaniment.
- Over the next 7 seconds, you can hear a block chord accompaniment.
- After 10 seconds more, there’s a broken chord accompaniment.
History of Homophony
The first appearance of homophonic texture was a predominant one in Western classical music in the early 17th century during the Baroque period. At that time, composers had started to commonly compose using vertical harmony, making the homophonic basso continuo a positive feature of the style.
Some of the composers known for their homophonic pieces during the Baroque period include Johann Sebastian Bach, Claudio Monteverdi, George Frideric Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi.
In Western music, it’s highly believed that homophony has originated in dance music because there was a need for a simple and direct rhythmic style to support the specified movements of various dances.
Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, both homophonic and polyphonic textures were present in the music. During the Renaissance period, polyphony was the common type, then monophony became the “it” style during the Baroque period. Since then, the choral arrangement of four voices (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) has become common in Western classical music.
Soon enough, homophony started to emerge in sacred music, knocking polyphony and monophony out of the status of the dominant form. It wasn’t long before homophony became a part of secular music as well, establishing itself as one of today’s standard forms.
