This paper examines funk music as a dynamic developing texture, as a contrapuntal practice that draws from pentatonic figurative schemas, and as collaborative cultural work, focusing on music by funk bands active in the 1960s and 1970s including Sly and the Family Stone, Tower of Power, Rufus featuring Chaka Kahn, and Earth, Wind, and Fire.

The analysis explores how performers mobilize pentatonic figures to form an intricate web of collaborative counterpoint, building from a pentatonic-referential base to form expansive and rhythmically complex pentatonic, blues-inflected, diatonic, and chromatic textures. The multilinear textures of funk contribute to implications of virtual social agency, musically modeling an ideal collaborative space. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of two important developments in the ongoing influence of funk performance practices: the crossover of funk textures in disco and the practice of sampling funk beats in hip hop music.