Let’s talk about ostinatos.
Those repeating melodic or rhythmic patterns that you hear in so much music today are everywhere. You’ll hear ostinatos in television, film, video game music, electronic, pop, rock music. Ostinatos are everywhere!
It’s a really useful compositional device to use in your music, it can help add a layer of suspense and motion to your song or really help to cement a groove that the listener can latch on to.
A dictionary definition of an ostinato is a repeated musical phrase or pattern that is used throughout a piece of music or a section of a piece of music.
You can think of ostinatos as essentially acting like a pedal. They act very similarly to a continuous drone that the rest of the harmony plays against. So in this way ostinatos can be quite harmonically ambiguous. That is, they don’t often dictate the key or tonality of a piece of music. They’re just there as a rhythmic layer to help drive the piece along.
You can, however, write more harmonically descriptive ostinatos that do highlight the key centre and tonality. For instance if you take the notes of a major or minor triad and order them in a pattern, you’ll get something that really pulls towards a certain harmonic centre.
In conclusion, ostinatos are useful and are really easy to incorporate into your compositions. You’ll find them everywhere so listen out next time you’re enjoying some music and take note when you hear one.
#musictheory #ostinato #musiceducation
