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Music Review
Final Exam
| Word | Definition |
|---|---|
| A Capella | Sung without instrumental accompaniment of any kind |
| Acoustics | The science of sound: how it is produced, transmitted, and received |
| Aleatory Music | Music composed using elements of chance |
| Anthem | An English sacred choral work |
| Aria | Italian for "air" or "melody"; any lyrical movement or piece for solo voice, usually with some kind of instrumental accompaniment |
| Artsong | A song set to serious poetry, usually for solo voice and piano, in the tradition of the German Lied |
| Ballad | A poem or song that tells a story |
| Bepop | New jazz style of the late 1940s/early 1950s that developed in response to the popularity of big band music;characterized by fast tempos, short burst of melodic phrases, heavy and unexpected rhythmic accents, and virtuosic soloing |
| Big Band Music | A style of jazz popular in the 1930s and 1940s in which instruments were grouped into sections by function, with carefully constructed arrangements |
| Blue Note | A pitch performed flatter (lower) than the standard major scale would indicate; usually occur as substitutes for the third and seventh notes of the standard major scale |
| Blues | A musical genre derived from African American performance traditions that uses blue notes (flattened pitches) in its melodies and tells first-person stories of hard knocks and love gone wrong |
| Cadence | A point of arrival signaling the end of a musical unit |
| Cadenza | In a concerto, an elaborate improvisation by the soloist on themes heard earlier in the movement, with no accompaniment from the orchestra. It occurs near the end of the recapitulation |
| Call-and-Response | A technique in which one musician or group sings or plays an opening motive, and another musician or group sings or plays an answer |
| Cantata | A type of vocal genre typically sung during a service of worship; in Italian "that which is sung" |
| Chamber Music | Vocal music with more than one singer to a part |
| Chord | Three or more notes played or sung at the same moment |
| Concerto | An instrumental genre for a soloist (or sometimes more than one soloist) and a larger ensemble |
| Consonance | The sound of notes together that our ear finds naturally right |
| Counterpoint | A style of writing in which every voice is a melody and all voices work together |
| Da Capo | Italian for "from the head"; a direction to go back and play from the very beginning of the piece |
| Dissonance | The sound of notes that clash, either harmonically or melodically, and do not seem to belong together |
| Drone Bass | A single long note held underneath the melodic line |
| Duple Meter | An underlying pattern of rhythm in which each unit consists of one accented beat followed by one unaccented beat (1-2| (1-2| etc.) or some multiple of two |
| Dynamics | The volume of sound, determined by the size (amplitude) of each sound wave |
| Electronic Music | Music using sounds generated (and not merely amplified) either in whole or in part by electronic means |
| Expressionism | A broad artistic movement that flourished in music, painting, and literature in the early decades of the twentieth century, in which psychological truth took precedence over beauty, and inner emotion took precedence over any sense of external reality |
| Fill | In jazz and popular styles, a short, instrumental response between a singer's phrases, or a brief solo occupying a musical gap between sections of a piece |
| Finale | A last movement of a multimovement work |
| Fugue | A polyphonic work based on a central theme and employing imitation |
| Gamelan | An Indonesian musical ensemble consisting primarily of a variety of pitched gongs and xylophones |
| Genre | The category of a work, determined by a combination of its performance medium and its social function |
| Glissando | A continuous melodic motion up or down that goes by so fast we almost cannot hear the individual notes |
| Gospel Music | Religious-themed music that burrows from R&B, blues, and other popular styles in its vocal and instrumental styles |
| Half Step | The smallest distance between two adjacent notes on a piano such as C-C# |
| Harmony | The sound created by multiple voices playing or singing together |
| Head | In jazz, the main melody of the song |
| Hip Hop | A cultural movement of the late 1970s through the turn of the century that included fashion, dance (break dancing), art (graffiti), and music (rap); characterized by semi-spoken lyrics that are recited against an accompaniment |
| Honky Tonk Music | A country style of the late 1940s/early 1950s that originally developed in the small bars that catered to rural and working-class audiences; characterized by small ensemble |
| Hook | A short, catchy motive that forms the memorable core of the song |
| Impressionism | An artistic movement focused more on sensations, perceptions, and light than on the direct representation of object |
| Interval | The distance between two pitches |
| Key | The central note and mode on which a melody or piece is based |
| Major Mode | A typical scale produced by singing "do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do", or by playing the white keys of the between C and C, which half steps occur between notes 3 and 4 and notes 7 ad 8; described as "bright" or "happy" |
| Measure | A rhythmic unit, indicated by bar lines in notated music, that presents one complete statement of the matter |
| Melisma | A syllable of text sung to many notes |
| Melody | A single line of notes heard in succession as a coherent unit |
| Minimalism | In music, a style in which a brief musical idea or group of ideas is repeated and varied incrementally over a long span of time, with a relatively slow rate of change |
| Minor Mode | A type of scale produced by playing the white keys on piano between A & A, in which half steps occur between notes 2 & 3 & notes 5 & 6, but often with the 7th note raised so that a half step also occurs between nots 7 and 8; described as "dark" or "sad" |
| Modernism | A spirit that took hold in all the arts, in the early twentieth century, representing a quest for novelty that far exceeded any such drive in the past |
| Musical | A spoken drama with a substantial amount of singing |
| Musique Concrete | French for "concrete music" Music using sounds generated by everyday, real objects not normally thought of as musical instruments and then manipulated electronically |
| Opera Buffa | Italian for "comic opera"; a genre that uses many of the same conventions as serious opera-arias, recitatives, ensembles, choruses-but with plots revolving around believable, everyday characters rather than mythical or historical figures |
| Operatta | Italian for "small opera." A nineteenth-century stage work that incorporated both singing and spoken dialogue, typically on a comic, lighthearted, or sentimental subject |
| Oral Tradition | One passed down without the aid of written words or notated music |
| Oratorio | A work musically similar to an opera but not staged, and usually on a sacred topic |
| Ostinato | A short pattern of notes repeated over and over |
| Pentatonic Scale | A scale consisting of five tones |
| Polytonality | The juxtaposition of two conventional harmonies in a way that creates a new dissonance |
| Postmodernism | A style in music and the other arts, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, in which modern and traditional elements are combined |
| Program Music | An instrumental work that is in some way associated with a story, event, or idea |
| Psychedelia | Music influenced by the hippie movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s, with its emphasis on mind-expanding drugs, brightly colored fashions, and spiritual and social freedom |
| Punk | Popular music of the mid-1970s that originally arose in reaction to the increasingly commercial and corporate rock of the era. Emphasized a do-it-yourself attitude |
| Raga | In the music of India, a mood, color, or musical scale that forms the basis of a musical composition |
| Ragtime | A style of music from the early twentieth century that emphasizes rhythmic syncopation while continuing many of the characteristics of marches, cakewalks, two-steps, and popular songs from the late nineteenth century |
| Recitative | A style of singing that lies somewhere between lyrical song and speech; also, the operatic number that is sung in this style |
| Recorder | A wind instrument widely used until ca. 1750, similar to a flute bt blown into from one end rather than from the side |
| Rock & Roll | A style of music that evolved in the mid-1950s out of R&B and country styles. It's teenage music, expressing concerns of midcentury young people |
| Rondo Form | A form in which an opening theme (A) returns repeatedly over the course of the movement, interspersed with contrasting ideas (B,C,etc.) |
| Sample | To record music or sound from an existing album |
| Scale | A series of notes that provide the essential pitch building blocks of a melody |
| Scherzo | In Italian "joke." A lighthearted movement in a fast tempo and in triple meter, similar in form to the minuet |
| Sequence | A short musical motive that repeats at successively higher or lower pitches |
| Serialism | A style of writing in which notes are drawn not from a scale, but from a predetermined series of notes |
| Shuffle Groove | A mid-tempo rhythmic pattern, typically in quadruple meter, in which each beat is subdivided into three pulses |
| Sitar | A plucked stringed instrument widely used on the Indian subcontinent |
| Sonata | A type of instrumental genre; literally, a work that is played, as opposed to sung |
| Sprechstimme | In German, "speech-voice." A style of singing halfway between speech and lyrical song, in which the singer hits precise pitches and then allows them to tail off, rather than sustaining them, as in lyrical singing |
| Standard Song Form | A common form for the choruses of "standards" or popular hits of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. It consists of 32 measures divided into four phrases in the pattern AABA |
| Stop Time | A kind of musical punctuation between sections, in which the instruments provide the basic accompaniment strike a single note on a down-beat of a measure together, then remain silent for the rest of the measure |
| Suite | A series of individual dance movements, typically in a variety of types such as minuets, gavottes, and gigues, and a variety of characters such as fast vs. slow |
| Swing | A rhythmic pattern of long and short notes approximately a two-to-one ratio, but varying from piece to piece and performer to performer |
| Swing Music | The name given generally to the popular jazz of the 1930s and 1940s that prominently featured a swing rhythm |
| Syncopation | A type of rhythm in which the notes run against the regular pulse of the musical meter, with accents on beats other than the ones usually accented |
| Tala | Fixed, repeated cycles of pulses widely used in music of the Indian subcontinent |
| Tonal | A style of writing that establishes a central note as a harmonic and melodic center of gravity, which in turn creates the potential for a strong sense of resolution and closure |
| Tonic | The note that establishes a key, based on its distinctive relationship with a particular set of harmonies or other notes in the underlying scale |
| Triple Meter | An underlying pattern of rhythm in which each unit consists of once accented beat followed by two unaccented beats (1-2-3, 1-2-3, etc.) |
| Tutti | Italian for "all": the full ensemble as opposed to a soloist |
| Twelve-Bar Blues AAB | A common model for blues songs, in which each verse consists of three lines of text over twelve measure of music, Each line receives four measure in a predetermined harmonic pattern using chords built on the first, fourth, and fifth scale degrees |
| Twelve-Tone Composition | A type of serial composition in which 20th-century composers manipulated a series consisting of all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, not repeating any of these notes until all other 11 had been sounded, thereby effectively avoiding any sense of tonality |
| Vamp | To repeat a basic section of the music in order to fill time or provide a basis for imrpovisation |
| Verse-Chorus | One of the simplest models in popular music. Chorus contains the main idea of the song, incorporating the title as well. When the chorus returns, it keeps the same text and music. Verses advance the plot, using same music each time but different texts. |
| Vocables | Meaningless sung syllables that take the place of song lyrics |
| Whole Tone Scale | A scale with only whole steps, no half steps; this eliminates any sense of a tonal center |
Created by:
ansecaballero
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