This repo is a collection of piano accompaniment textures found in classical or other genres of music, designed to be a pool of inspiration to steal learn from, written in Lilypond language.
There is scarcity of piano textures in the pop, rock, or even jazz context. Most of the materials contains only block chords, arpeggios, riffs, and at most some chorale lines, thus incorporating other textures from time to time can be helpful to sustain interest.
The lilypond project and the rendered image is in the data folder of the source code, organized by genre, composer, opus - piece, then movement. Within each folder, there are three type of files:
- A .ly file which is the main project.
- A header.ily file containing information about the piece.
- Many image files which is the rendered result of the project.
However it's really a hassle opening every image one by one, a better way of previewing is to have a searchable and tagged database which lists all images in one place. But that takes a lot of time. So until I decide to make one, please use the wiki for now. I will make one page for every uploaded piece, including motives and combinations of textures used in the movement, explained below.
Motives page lists a set of basic texture patterns used in the piece, transposed to C major.
Example:
Each motif is given a short name with three parts:
- Alphabet: The name of the super-category of the texture, in the case above is Arpeggio.
- Number: The main variation of the texture in concept.
- Apostrophes: The minor applied variation with the same concept. For example a1 is a 64th-note arpeggio with only C and G, and a1' differs by one note. Each variation may have different voicing, rhythm, or notes, but should share the core concept. For example a4 differs completely from a4' and a4'', but they are all based on the concept of arpeggio with multiple notes.
Combinations are how motives are combined in the actual music, usually with an extra melody and/or a bass layer. However, since this is not music analysis, not all contents are covered, some combinations or even motives might be left out to simply and shorten the result.
Indicated in the upper-left corner, combinations are categorized by the number of voices within a measure, or part measures. Each combination has its motivic elements listed in a box above the staff, with "+" representing motives happening simultaneously, and "|" representing otherwise.
Different voices are colored differently, with red being the melody, blue the bass, and others the accompaniment voices.
Two hand playing the identical motif or variations are considered as two voices:
However, them contributing to a single motif are considered as one voice.
Sometimes, I may include some observations of things to consider as comments below the staff.