ABSTRACT
It may be that the way post-tonal music sounds sets it apart from earlier styles as much as anything. This seems obvious, since music is about sound, after all, but what “sound” means in this context is a little narrower. Here we are referring especially to timbre and texture, two aspects of music that have received much attention from post-tonal composers. Timbre means tone color, and it can refer to the tone color of an individual instrument or of an ensemble. As we will see, the timbral ranges of both have expanded greatly since the Romantic era. Texture is a little harder to de ne, although most of us have a pretty good idea of its meaning. We could say that texture refers to the relationships between the parts (or voices) at any moment in a composition; it especially concerns the relationships between rhythms and contours, but it is also concerned with aspects such as spacing and dynamics. Not infrequently the line between timbre and texture is unclear, especially when a large ensemble is involved.
