[Thor Joachim Haga]

I think it’s important to distinguish between texture and timbre. As Copland describes in What to Listen for in Music, texture is more what we would call polyphony, homophony, or monophony, depending. Timbre is the use of instrumental color for effect. His main elements of music are rhythm, harmony, timbre, texture, form, and yes, melody. I feel bad for people who only listen for melodies. Interesting music comes form knowing when and how to use all the elements.

Yes, you’re no doubt right about the difference between texture and timbre, Schilke, but texture is kinda used in colloquial speech as these layered sounds. In my (now ancient) thesis, I used Leonard B. Meyer’s definition in his iconic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956):

“Texture has to do with the ways in which the mind groups concurrent musical stimuli into simultaneous figures /…/ a distribution of texture is not necessarily apprehended in terms of a figure-ground distribution but can quite readily be perceived as the co-existence of several, independent, well-articulated figures” (Meyer 1956: 185)

Less specific, but general enough to serve my purpose in that context.