Texture in the system of artistic and expressive means of music

Abstract

The contemporary musical culture, shaped by diverse schools and aesthetic movements, presents complex challenges in understanding artistic worlds, inter-style dialogue, and the synthesis of arts. This article explores the phenomenon of musical texture as a key element in the organic connection between arts. Drawing on a systematic historical-stylistic analysis, the study reconceptualizes musical texture as a system-forming principle that organizes expressive means across eras, genres and instruments. It synthesizes literature from musicology, timbre studies and performance theory to propose a model that captures texture through interacting parameters, and traces how shifts among monody, polyphony, homophony and modern sonorities are driven by transformations in these parameters. Using hermeneutic, the study shows that texture both encodes and generates stylistic meaning: it preserves instrumental and genre memory while enabling novel syntheses (e.g., sonority, clusters, neo-heterophony) that reconfigure compositional and performative practice. The paper therefore bridges compositional theory, interpretative practice and contemporary timbre-oriented approaches, arguing that texture should be treated as a primary analytical category for understanding the contemporary musical evolution and cross-modal artistic synthesis.