CHARACTERISTICS OF TEXTURE IN THE LATVIAN PIANO MUSIC

Abstract

Considering that the origins of Latvian piano music are rooted in the second half of the 19th century, the first piano works of Latvian composers are filled with unambiguous elements of romantic style that also appear in forms and content of texture. Homophonic and polyphonic textures, as well as the romantic traditions of diverse figurative elements in Latvian piano music are dominant until the middle of the 20th century, when, in the musical language, other stylistic gusts (neoclassical figurative linearity, etc.) appeared.

Along with elements of new composition techniques (dodecaphonic, sonoric, aleatoric) that entered Latvian piano music in the 1960s, there are changes in the texture of piano works. This tendency also contributes the regeneration of the theoretical concepts of texture, because the new texture forms cannot always be systematized based on conventional types: monophony, heterophony, homophony and polyphony, but the most important is the classification based on the intensity of the relationships of the textural relief and background – continual (linear), discrete and polymorphic structures. Despite the fact that attention is focused mostly on the Latvian piano music of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, this classification is also active in the analysis of the musical texture of different historical periods. The continual (linear) texture is often used in polyphonic music, but the most frequent type of texture in piano music – homophony – is usually polymorphic (complex) formation.