1 Some Remarks on Textural Stratification in 20 th -Century Music John Covach (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) [Spring 2001] The subject of my talk today is a characteristic that may be found in much 20 th -century music, but despite this, is something that also has not received a lot of attention from theorists and analysts who specialize in this repertory. What I am terming “textural stratification” is the idea that musical passages may be made up of layers of musical activity that, while heard together, resist reduction down to a single musical event. If we think for a minute of the counterpoint of Bach or Palastrina, it will be readily admitted that parts in such music achieve an often elegant independence from one another, creating something like layers or textural strata in the sense I mean. But in that music, practices in the treatment of consonance and dissonance mean that in some sense, the music can and must be heard harmonically—or, if one resists the notion of hearing Palastrina harmonically, one must at least attend to the simultaneities that result from the combination of contrapuntal strands. Textural stratification, by contrast, occurs when strata are not subject to the constraints of traditional contrapuntal practice or harmonic consideration. Maybe the easiest way to introduce what I mean by textural stratification and to begin to capture what I think is important in dealing with it analytically is to offer a bit of a personal history. When I was twelve or so I began improvising on the guitar. I had played chords and notes on the instrument for a year or two before that, but one day my guitar teacher showed me the minor pentatonic scale, which everybody just called the “block pattern.” The rules of improvisation as I learned them back then went something like this: If I play a chord progression in E, and you play the lead pattern in E, it’ll sound cool. I’m pretty sure the tune we jammed on