Color, Form, and Style in Music

So far, we have covered four of the basic elements of music:

Today we’ll conclude our introduction to the basic elements of music with timbre, form, and style.

Timbre

Timbre (pronounced tam-ber) means tone color, the characteristic sound produced by a voice or instrument. It is how we can tell the difference between two different instruments, such as a trumpet and a piano. On the surface, timbre seems pretty simple: learn the names of instruments (which most of us know already), what they sound like, and that’s all there is to timbre. Yet the study of timbre is rather complex from a scientific point of view, and is out of our scope, at least for now. If you would like to read a scientific discussion of timbre go to this article.

Another area of the study of timbre is how to combine different instruments to make well-blended, new, or interesting sounds. Studying the combination of timbres is called orchestration. To be an effective orchestrator, you must learn as much as possible about all the instruments you intend to use. This doesn’t mean you need to learn to play every one of them (even though that would help). But you must learn each instrument’s characteristics, such as its range, that is, what pitches it is capable of playing, its dynamic characteristics, and so on. You must also learn what is idiomatic for each instrument. For example, certain musical passages will work well for one instrument, but not for another. There are many good books available, but you need more than books to learn orchestration effectively. You need to listen to the instruments in context, and study musical scores that contain the instruments you are interested orchestrating.

Lastly, timbre is important in performance. Part of learning to create quality sounds on your instrument involves learning how to produce good tone quality, or good timbre. A singer has to learn how to shape vowels, and use proper breathing to create a quality of tone that is pleasant for the listener. As we’ve seen with the other elements of music, we commonly use metaphors to describe tone quality (e.g., “dark,” “bright,” “warm”).

Musical Form

Musical form is how the previous five elements of music (pitch, time, texture, dynamics, timbre) are arranged, combined and coordinated to create an effective, unified whole. Throughout music history, composers tended to favor popular and accepted ways of organizing the musical parts. These have become known as standard forms. For example, binary form, is a standard form where the musical structure divides into two parts; ternary form is a musical structure in three parts. But as you can imagine, musical form is much more than merely how many parts there are to a piece of music. Furthermore, music is art, not science. So even though these standard forms exist, it is difficult to find any two pieces that are truly the same in formal structure. Obviously, composers do not start with an empty formal template, and fill it in, the way one fills in a form such as an application for employment. Form is the overall shape of a piece of music, and all musical elements contribute to that shape. So a musical form is not a rigid mold, but an organic and flexible structure that serves the creative process to heighten musical drama and expression.

Musical Style

Now, when we listen to music, we are hearing all of the elements of music working together as one. Part of what makes music so rich is the seemingly infinite number of ways to combine the elements to create distinctively different sounds. This brings us to musical style, the combination of the elements of music that results in a sound that characterizes a certain type of music. When we talk about style, we may be talking about the style of a period of music. For example, the Classical style, strictly speaking, is the musical style that was predominant around the middle of the 18^th century. The Baroque style was before that. But there have always been numerous composers working within a given period style, each having his or her own personal tendencies. So style also may be applied to individual composers, such as Mozart’s style, or Bach’s style. Finally, style may refer to different types of music, such as jazz, popular, or country style.

To conclude our discussion, I would like to clarify one more term: musical genre. Genre generally refers to a class of music, such as symphonic music, opera, chamber music, etc. Technically, these are genres, not forms or styles.

Now that we have introduced the elements of music, we are ready to go deeper into each one of them. Next up, we’ll learn how to notate pitch.