Question | Answer |
City-state | city that governed itself and the territory immediately around it |
Squarcialupi Codex | music manuscript containing 354 compositions |
Trecento | century of the 1300s in which arts flourished in Florence |
Caccia | piece involving a musical canon in upper 2 voices supported by a slower moving tenor; means “hunt” |
Landini cadence | sixth in outer voices expand to an octave; added lower neighbor-tone to upper part as it moved up to octave |
Giovanni Boccaccio | wrote Decameron after surviving the Black Death through help of some women friends |
Decameron | written by Giovanni Boccaccio; set of stories centered around women |
Magister cappellae | leader of the chapel |
Filippo Brunelleschi | Florentine architect who built a dome for the Florentines |
Number symbolism | numbers possessed rich theological associations |
Rondellus | distinctly English musical practice; 2 or 3 voices engage in voice exchange or phrase exchange |
Faburden | singers improvised around a given chant |
Fauxbourdon | singers of sacred music improvised at pitches a fourth and sixth below a given plainsong |
Carol | strophic song for one to three voices, all of which were newly composed |
Pan-isorhythmic | isorhythm applied to all voices, not just tenor |
Contenance angloise | English manner (no dissonance) |
Pan-consonance | almost every note is a member of a triad or a triadic inversion and not a dissonance |
Burgundian lands | Dukes inherited, purchased, and conquered large portions of present-day northern France and the Low Countries |
Chanson | French word for song |
L’Homme arme’ tune | means Armed Man; written after fall of Constantinople – many polyphonic masses built upon it |
Cantus firmus Mass | cyclic Mass in which 5 movements of the Ordinary are unified by means of a single cantus firmus |
Cantus firmus | Latin meaning “firm” or “well-established”; a well-established, previously existing melody |
Joan of Arc | miraculous Maid of Orleans who rescued France from the English in the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War |
Mensuration canon | two voices perform the same music at different rates of speed; start at the same time, but one moves faster |
Paraphrase technique | composer takes a pre-existing plainsong and embellishes it, imparting to it a rhythmic profile…elaborated chant serves as a basic melodic material for a polyphonic composition |
Paraphrase Mass | all movements are united by a single paraphrased chant |
Quodlibet | several secular tunes brought together; Latin for “whatever you like” |
Multiple cantus firmus Mass | two or more cantus firmi sound simultaneously or successively in a Mass |
hauts instruments | loud – trumpets, shawms, bagpipes, drums, and tambourine |
Sackbut | slide trumpet; means “push-pull”…related to trombone |
Bas instruments | soft – recorder, vielle, lute, harp, psaltery, portative organ, and harpsichord |
Basse danse | principal aristocratic dance of court and city during the early Renaissance |
Quattrocento | fifteenth century in Italy…Italian word for “the 1400’s”; period of enormous creativity in the visual arts |
Contrafactum | transforming a secular piece into a sacred one |
Frottola | used as a catch-all word to describe a polyphonic setting of a wide variety of strophic Italian poetry |
Madrigal | catch-all term to describe settings of Italian verse; through-composed in 16th C. instead of strophic like before |
Text painting (word painting) | music sounds out the meaning of the text, almost word for word |
Madrigalism | musical clichés as sighs and dissonances for “harsh” words |
Soggetto cavato | a “cut-out subject”…subject cut-out from the vowels |
Penitential Psalms | seven Psalms among the 150 of the Psalter that are especially remorseful in tone and sung in the rites of the Catholic Church surrounding death and burial |
Recitation tone | a constantly repeating pitch followed by a meditation; at the heart of the psalm tone |
Clavichord | medieval instrument that produces sound when a tiny metal tangent in the shape of a “T” is pushed into the string from beneath |
Lute | pear-shaped instrument with six sets of strings called courses, then made of animal gut, now made of wire |
Consort | an ensemble of instruments all of one family |
Broken consort | mixed ensemble; when instruments of different types play together |
Canzona | freely composed instrumental piece, usually for organ or instrumental ensemble, which imitated the lively rhythms and lightly imitative style of the Parisian chanson |