UC San Diego

“Amplifying the Status of Texture in a Musical Work” explores the formal strategies and consequences of musical texture serving a heightened function in a musical work by means of successive textural prolongations. Through two distinctive case studies of my own composition Constellations and composer Beat Furrer’s Spur, the formation and linear organization of idiosyncratic musical textures are examined to demonstrate how they operate within each work and how they each uniquely attain an amplified state of formal salience. These contrasting examples serve to offer an examination on formal consistencies and incongruities between the works, highlighting archetypal features of texturally focused compositions, as well as offering contrasting approaches to such designs. This study demonstrates how the organization of textural prolongations within a texture-centric narrative heavily relies on a balance of relatively low–activity and high–activity states of tension. The distinctive characteristics of textural components and the number of such component entities operating in a textural narrative, the integration or stratification of textures and number of stratified layers, and the ordering and proportionality of these activity states are imperative formal distinctions between such compositions. Extra features, including the incorporation of conventional melodic motives, various forms of transitional function, and formed narratives of timbral and dynamic progressions also further dimensionalize texturally dominant compositions. By presenting these observations through two case studies, various considerations on formal design strategies can be illuminated regarding texture–focused composition. The aim of this study is a discovery of novel forms of musical expression through the magnification of coordinated textural schemes.