Creation of Texture Part I

HOW TO BECOME FLUENT IN CREATING GOOD MUSICAL TEXTURE?

Creation of Texture is the last chapter of my project which I call The John Williams Compositional Techniques book. Part of it has been quoted here in this blog. I hope you find it useful for the improvement of your compositional abilities. Enjoy!

Creation of Texture

In the course of my investigations I’ve discovered that John Williams has a great imagination when it comes to creating new rich textures for action cue, as well as other scenes.

Even though he sometimes may borrow some textural ideas from other composers, most of his creations genuinely come from himself. They are combinations of ideas which comprise the principles studied in The John Williams Compositional Techniques book.

One of his strong characteristics is that he doesn’t like to stay focused on a single idea and variations of it (like modern ostinatos action cues) but instead, he keeps changing texture and orchestration every few bars. It is done not only for the sake of more precision in scoring to picture but also to increase interest in the music itself.

This is obviously more difficult to achieve but I consider the end result better than the modern kind of music written for action scenes.

In order to achieve such results, the composer needs to train his ability to create new textures fluently and this is what we are going to do with what I call “Creation of Textures” exercises.

In this exercise we are going to create one or more textures between two or more pre-existing ones. The challenge is to be fluent and sensible towards the original drama while preserving the same compositional quality.

Transitions of texture (chapter 5) and drama (chapter 7) play a major role here.

1) Choose two (or more) textures of about 4 bars each.

2) Copy/transcribe them to you preferred notation software.

3) Create four blank bars in between them (you will eventually feel the need of more bars).

4) Create a new texture applying the principles studied in the previous chapters.

CREATION OF TEXTURE I

CREATION OF TEXTURE II

OBS (1): Both are fragments of the track "The Coming Storm".

OBS (2): the book The John Williams Compositional Techniques has not been released yet. 2017 is a good time for great development of this project and if you want to keep updated about it subscribe to my Blog and my YouTube Chanel.

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