A Short Figure That Is Repeated Over and Over Again Is Called an

May 14, 2022 Post a Comment

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Absolute music Instrumental music with no explicit pictorial or literal associations. As opposed to program music.

a cappella Music for voices alone, without instrumental accompaniment.

accelerando Getting faster.

accent A conspicuous, sudden accent given to a particular audio, unremarkably by an increase in volume.

accidental A notational sign in a score indicating that a specific annotation is to be played every bit a apartment, abrupt, or natural. The most common accidentals (flats and sharps) represent to the five black notes in each octave of the keyboard.

accompaniment The subordinate textile or voices that support a tune.

acoustics (i) the science of sound; (ii) the art of optimizing sound in an enclosed space.

adagio Quite slow tempo.

allegro; allegretto Fast tempo; slightly fast tempo

alto (ane) The lowest adult female voice; (2) the second-highest voice in a four-role texture.

andante; andantino Moderately deadening (walking) tempo; a footling faster than andante.

antiphon Originally, a plainchant that framed the singing of a psalm. The term derives from the early practice of singing psalms "antiphonally"- that is, with 2 or more alternate choirs.

appoggiatura A strong-crush racket that resolves to a consonance; used as an expressive device in much tonal music.

aria In opera or oratorio, a fix piece, normally for a single performer, that expresses a character'due south emotion about a particular situation.

arioso A singing way between aria and recitative.

arpeggio A chord whose individual notes are played successively rather than simultaneously.

arrangement An orchestration of a skeletal score or a reorchestration of a finished composition.

ars nova The "new fine art" of fourteenth-century France; refers to the stylistic innovations, particularly rhythmic, of composers around 1320.

articulation The way in which side by side notes of a melody are connected or separated.

art vocal A song focusing on artistic rather than popular expression.

a tempo At the original tempo.

atonality; atonal The absence of whatsoever sense of tonality.

augmentation The restatement of a theme in longer note values, ofttimes twice as long (and therefore twice equally irksome) equally the original.

avant garde In the art, on the leading edge of a change in style.

ballade (one) One of several types of medieval secular songs, ordinarily in A-A-B form; (2) a type of nineteenth-century grapheme piece for piano.

carol opera A popular eighteenth-century English dramatic course characterized by spoken dialogue on topical themes interspersed with popular folk songs.

ballata A type of fourteenth-century italian secular song, like to the French virelai.

ballet The theatrical presentation of grouping or solo dancing of corking precision to a musical accompaniment, usually with costumes and scenery and carrying a story or theme.

bar Same as measure.

baritone Adult male voice of moderately depression range.

basic set The underlying tone row in a serial composition.

bass (one) The lowest adult male voice; (2) the lowest voice in a polyphonic texture.

bass clef The clef in the upper staff that shows pitches mostly below heart C

basse danse A popular Renaissance court dance for couples.

blue note In blues singing or jazz, the deliberate offpitch lowering of sure pitches.

blues (I)A form of African-American folk music, characterized by simple, repetitive structures and a highly flexible vocal delivery; (ii) the style of singing heard in the blues.

bow In string playing, a bundle of bleached horsehairs stretched tautly betwixt the ends of a wooden stick. To produce a sound, the bow is drawn over one or more of the strings.

branle A high-stepping Renaissance group trip the light fantastic.

brass A family of instruments with cup-shaped mouthpieces through which the player blows into a series of metallic tubes. Usually constructed of brass or silverish.

bridge (1) A passage connecting two sections of a limerick; (2) on string instruments, a modest slice of wood that holds the strings higher up the body.

cadence cadential The musical punctuation that separates phrases or periods, creating a sense of residue or conclusion that ranges from momentary to concluding.

cadenza An improvised passage for a soloist, unremarkably placed within the closing ritornello in a concerto move.

catechism (i) Strict faux, in which 1 voice imitates another at a staggered time interval; (ii) a piece that uses canon throughout, such as "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."

cantata A Baroque genre for voice(south) and instruments on a sacred or secular poem, including recitatives, arias, and sometimes choruses.

cantus firmus ("fixed melody") A pre-existing plainchant or secular melody incorporated into a polyphonic composition, common from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries.

castrato A male singer castrated during boyhood to preserve his soprano or alto song register. Castratos played a prominent office in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera.

CD-ROM Compact disc-read only retentivity. A meaty-disc technology that enables a personal computer to access digitally text, all the same images, moving pictures, and sound.

celesta A small keyboard instrument invented in 1886 whose hammers strike a series of resonating steel plates to produce a bell-like but veiled sound. Used by composers from Tchaikovsky to Boulez.

cell In certain twentieth-century compositions, a brief, recurring musical figure that does not undergo traditional motivic development.

sleeping accommodation music Music played by small ensembles, such as a cord quartet, with one performer to a office.

chance music A type of contemporary music in which some or all of the elements, such as rhythm or the interaction among voices, are left to risk.

chanson (French, "song") The most popular form of secular vocal music in northern Europe during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. graphic symbol piece A short Romantic piano slice that expresses a single overall mood. choir (1) A song ensemble with more than one vocaliser to a part; (2) a section of an instrumental ensemble, such every bit a brass choir.

chorale (1) A German hymn, especially pop in the Bizarre; (ii) a polyphonic setting of such a hymn, such equally those past J. S. Bach.

chord A grouping of three or more pitches sounded simultaneously.

chordal style An alternate term for homophony. chorus (1) Aforementioned as choir; (2) each varied repetition of a 12-bar blues pattern; (3) the chief section of an American popular vocal, following the poetry(due south).

chromatic A descriptive term for melodies or harmonies that employ all or most of the twelve degrees of the octave.

chromatic calibration The design that results when all twelve adjacent semitones in an octave are played successively.

clef In musical notation, a symbol at the starting time of a staff that determines the pitches of the lines and spaces. The most mutual clefs are treble (4) for indicating pitches more often than not above middle C and bass (9;) for indicating pitches mostly below heart C.

closing area In a motion in sonata form, the last stage in an exposition or recapitulation that confirms the temporary or home central with a series of cadences.

coda The optional last department of a movement or an unabridged composition.

combinatorial A descriptive term for tone rows in which the second one-half is a transposed version of the first half.

compound meters Duple or triple meters in which the private beats are subdivided into triple units.

concertina The solo grouping in a Bizarre concerto grosso.

concerto An instrumental composition for orchestra and soloist (or a small group of soloists).

concerto grosso The primary variety of Baroque concerto, for a small group of soloists (the concertino) and a larger ensemble (the ripieno).

disco A way of pop dance music characterized by slick, ostinato-like rhythms and propulsive, repetitive lyrics.

disjunct movement Melodic motion past a jump rather than by a footstep.

dissonance Intervals or chords that sound impure, harsh, or unstable.

dominant (1) The 5th degree of the diatonic scale. (2) the triad built on this caste; (three) the central oriented around this degree.

dominant seventh chord A dominant triad with an added seventh degree-for example, G-B-D-F. dotted rhythm The alternation of LONG and short notes, named later on the note used to record them.

downbeat A stiff or accented shell, most frequently the start trounce of a measure.

drone A sustained tone (a kind of permanent pedal indicate) over which a melody unfolds.

duet A composition for 2 performers.

duple meter The regular grouping of beats into twos (STRONG-weak). The almost common duple meters have two or four beats per measure. dynamics The relative softness or loudness of a annotation or passage.

electronic music Music in which some or all of the sounds are produced past electronic generators. embellishment An ornamental improver to a simpler tune.

ensemble (1) A group of performers; (2) a musical number in an opera, oratorio, or cantata sung past two or more performers; (iii) the extent to which a group of performers coordinate their performance.

entry In an imitative texture, the showtime of each statement of the theme.

envelope The graphic representation of a sound'south set on, duration, and pattern of disuse.

episode (1) In a fugue, a freer passage between full statements of the subject field; (2) in ritornello form, a freer concertina passage betwixt ripieno statements of the ritornello.

espressivo Expressively.

estampie A type of early on instrumental (maybe trip the light fantastic) music consisting of independent sections strung together.

Etude A musical piece designed to address a particular technical problem on an instrument.

exposition The first section of a movement in sonata grade.

expression (I)The general character of a passage or work; (2) the blend of feeling and intellect brought to a operation by the performer.

Expressionism A short-lived Austro-German fine art motion at the beginning of the twentieth century, marked by a focus on the dark, mysterious side of the homo mind.

Fauvism The French version of Austro-German language Expressionism.

fermata In musical notation, a sign (-) indicating the prolongation of a note or rest across its notated value.

figure (1) In Baroque and Classical music, the numbers below a staff designating the harmonies to exist filled in above; (ii) a general term for a cursory melodic design.

figured bass The Bizarre system of adding figures to a bass line, indicating what harmonies are to be improvised on each beat.

final In plainchant, the concluding annotation in a fashion; corresponds roughly to the tonic note in a tonal scale.

finale (1) The final move of an instrumental work; (ii) the big ensemble that concludes an act in an opera.

fine arts The realm of man experience characterized equally aesthetic rather than practical or commonsensical, including music, painting, trip the light fantastic toe, theater, and film.

fingerboard A slice of wood extending from the torso of a string instrument; the strings are attached to the cease of the fingerboard.

flat (i) In musical notation, a sign (6) indicating that the note it precedes is to be played a one-half step lower; (2) the term used to specify a particular note, for instance, B6.

FM synthesis Frequency-modulation synthesis; a superior version of electronic synthesis introduced in the consumer market past Yamaha in 1982.

folk music Music indigenous to a particular ethnic grouping, usually preserved and transmitted orally.

form A term used to designate standardized musical shapes, such as binary form or sonata grade.

forte ; fortissimo Loud; very loud.

fortepiano The wooden-framed eighteenth-century piano used past Mozart, Haydn, and their contemporaries.

fragmentation The technique of developing a them,, by dividing it into smaller units, most common in the music of the Viennese Classicists.

frequency In acoustics, the number of times per second that the air carrying a sound vibrates equally a wave. fret A raised strip across the fingerboard of a stringed instrument, designed to produce a specific pitch when stopped at that bespeak.

frottola A light, popular Italian song, a precursor of the Italian madrigal.

fugato A fugal passage within a composition.

fugue A polyphonic composition that makes systematic use of imitation, usually based on a single subject area, and that opens with a series of exposed entries on that discipline.

cardinal The basic pitch of a tone.

gamelan A minor Javanese orchestra consisting mainly of metallic percussion instruments.

genre . The term used to place a general category of music that shares similar performance forces, formal structures, and/or mode-for example, "string quartet" or " 1 2-bar blues."

glissando Rapid sliding from one note to some other, unremarkably on continuous-pitch instruments such as the trombone or violin, but also on discrete-pitch instruments such every bit the pianoforte or harp.

ground (bass) A repeating pattern, unremarkably in the bass, over which a melody unfolds, as in Dido'due south complaining from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.

half cadence An intermediate cadence, usually on the dominant chord, inside a musical period.

half pace (semitone) The interval between any two adjacent notes on a keyboard; the smallest interval in common apply in Western music.

harmonic (one) In acoustics, a synonym for overtone or partial; (2) in cord playing, a loftier-pitched, whistling tone made past bowing a lightly stopped string. harmonic minor scale The scale that results from flatting the third and sixth degrees of the major scale. harmonic rhythm The rate at which harmony changes and the caste of regularity with which it changes.

harmonize To provide a melody with a chordal accompaniment.

harmony (1) In general, the simultaneous aspects of music; (2) specifically, the simultaneous playing of two or more different sounds.

harpsichord A Baroque keyboard musical instrument in which the strings are plucked past quills.

head The beginning of a theme.

heavy metal A descriptive term for stone bands since the 1970s whose heavily amplified electric and percussion sounds have been associated with youthful rebellion and defiance.

heterophony (heter-off-ony) A texture in which two or more variations of the same melody are performed simultaneously, common in folk music.

hexachord the 6 usable degrees of the modal scale, often used to organize Renaissance music.

hocket In tardily medieval polyphony, the alternation of short melodic phrases (or even single notes) between two voices.

homophony ; homophonic (ho-mof-ony;homo-fonick) Texture in which all the voices move more or less together (ofttimes referred to every bit the chordal fashion).

hymn A unproblematic religious song in several stanzas, sung in a church service by the congregation.

idee fixe (French, "stock-still idea") Term used by Berlioz for the theme representing his beloved in every move of his Symphonie fantastique.

imitation The successive repetition in unlike voices of a single musical idea.

Impressionism A French art motion of the late nineteenth century that rejected Romanticism in favor of fleeting, informal scenes from everyday life. improvisation The spontaneous, on-the-spot creation of music, preserved today largely in jazz only mutual in Western music well into the nineteenth century. incidental music Music performed earlier and during a play to intensify the mood.

intermedio In the Renaissance, a musical amusement between the acts of a play.

interpretation The manner in which a performer carries out a composer's operation directions.

interval The acoustical distance between two pitches, usually reckoned past the number of intervening scale degrees.

introduction A passage or section, oftentimes in a slow tempo, that prepares the way for a more extended section.

inversion The playing of a melody upside downward, with upwardly intervals played downwards and vice verse, most common in contrapuntal and serial music.

irregular meter The mixture at a single rhythmic level of more than one metric grouping.

jazz A manner of operation developed largely past African-Americans afterward 1900; the most original form of American music in the twentieth century.

jongleur ; jongleuress (zhong-ler;zhong-ler-ess)Male person and female person musical minstrels of the Centre Ages.

Thou

central (1) In tonal music, one of twelve possible tonalities organized effectually a triad congenital on the chief note(two) on a keyboard, a lever pressed downwardly to produce sound.

key signature Sharps or flats placed at the beginning of a staff to indicate the cardinal of a passage or work.

Thousand. numbers The common method of referring to works by Mozart, after the chronological catalogue first published by Ludwig Kochel in 1865.

largo ; larghetto Very boring tempo; less wearisome than largo.

legato The smooth, seamless connection of adjacent notes in a melody.

Leitmotiv A term adopted past Wagner's disciples to designate the "leading motives" in his operas.

libretto A "little volume" that contains the consummate text of an opera, oratorio, and so along.

Lied (German, "song") A vocal piece dating back to the polyphonic Lied of the fourteenth century. The solo High german Lied, accompanied by piano, reached its zenith during the nineteenth century.

line A general term for a discrete vocalisation or function in a vocal or instrumental composition.

liturgical drama A sung religious dialogue that flourished during the eleventh and 12th centuries. Liturgical in spirit even when performed outside the formal liturgy, liturgical dramas were the most elaborate form of medieval music.

lyre An ancient plucked cord instrument in the shape of a box (Figure 5. i), whose association with music especially with the mythological character Orpheus) is and then stiff that the word lyric is derived from it.

madrigal A vocal form that arose in Italy during the sixteenth century and developed into the well-nigh ambitious secular form of the Renaissance.

madrigalism An alternating term for word painting, reflecting the frequent use of word painting in the Renaissance madrigal.

major mode One of ii colorings practical to a key, characterized past the major calibration and the resulting predominance of major triads. Generally sounds brilliant and stable.

major calibration A pattern of seven (ascending) notes, five separated by whole steps, with half steps between the 3rd and 4th and the seventh and eighth degrees.

major seventh A highly dissonant interval a half stride smaller than an octave.

major tertiary An interval consisting of four one-half steps-, a major tertiary forms the lesser interval of a major triad.

major triad A triad consisting of a major tertiary plus a minor 3rd bounded past a perfect fifth.

march A armed forces fashion (or piece) characterized past strongly accented duple meter and clear sectional structures.

Mass (1) The central worship service of the Roman Catholic Church; (ii) the music written for that service.

mazurka Polish folk trip the light fantastic toe in rapid triple meter with stiff offbeat accents.

measure out (bar) The single recurrence of each regular pattern in a meter, consisting of a strong first beat out and weaker subsidiary beats and ready off in musical notation by vertical lines known as bar lines. melisma; melismatic (muh-liz-muh;mel-iz-mat-ic) Technique of singing in which a single syllable receives many notes.

melody (one) The aspect of music having to do with the succession of single notes in a coherent organisation; (2) a detail succession of such notes (too referred to as tune, theme, or voice).

meter The organization of strong and weak beats into a regular, recurring pattern.

metronome Mechanical (or, today, electric) device that ticks (or blinks) out regular tempos from about 40 to 208 beats per minute.

metronome marking A number, usually placed at the summit of a slice, that indicates tempo by telling how many beats of a certain annotation value will be heard per minute, for example, J = lx.

mezzo (met-zoh) Medium, as in mezzopiano (medium soft).

microtones Intervals smaller than a half step.

MIDI Acronym for "musical instrument digital interface," the industry-wide standard adopted in 1982 that permits personal computers and synthesizers to talk to 1 another.

miniature A descriptive term for a brusk Romantic slice, normally for pianoforte.

minimalism A contemporary style marked by steady pulse, simple triadic harmonies, and insistent repetition of short melodic patterns.

pocket-sized mode Ane of two colorings, generally dark and unstable, applied to a key, characterized past the modest scale and the resulting predominance of minor triads.

minor scale The scale in which the third and sixth degrees are the lower of two options. The melodic modest scale raises the 6th and 7th degrees in ascending passages and lowers them in descending passages.

modest third An interval consisting of iii half steps; a small-scale third forms the bottom interval of a minor triad.

small-scale triad A triad consisting of a minor third plus a major third bounded by a perfect fifth.

minuet A seventeenth-century court trip the light fantastic toe in moderate triple meter that later served as the model for the third motility of Classical instrumental works. manner (1) In the Middle Ages, a means of organizing plainchant according to orientations around the 7-note diatonic scale (corresponding to the white notes on a keyboard); (ii) in the tonal system, one of the two colorings, called major and minor, that may be applied to any of twelve keys.

modulation The process of irresolute keys in a tonal work, every bit in "the modulation from C major to F pocket-sized."

molto allegro Very fast tempo.

monody A fashion of accompanied solo singing that evolved in the early Baroque in which the meaning of the text was expressed in a flexible vocal line.

monophony ; monophonic (mo-nof-ony;mo-no-fonick) A musical texture consisting of a single phonation, equally in plainchant.

Moog Robert , American inventor of early synthesizers. During the 1970s his most pop synthesizer was itself known as "the Moog." morality play In the Heart Ages, a monophonic drama ready to music to illustrate a moral indicate, such as the struggle between good and evil. An example is Hildegarde of Bingen'south Play of the Virtues (pages 7982).

motet A descriptive term for the several varieties of polyphonic vocal music, more often than not sacred, from the Heart Ages to the nowadays.

motive The smallest coherent unit of a larger musical thought.

movement A cocky-contained, largely independent portion of a larger piece, such as a symphony or concerto.

multimedia Rapidly developing applied science that enables data of all kinds-text, nonetheless images, moving pictures, sound-to be stored and retrieved on a single digital medium, such as CD-ROM or videodisc.

multi-timbral A descriptive term for the power of a synthesizer to tape different timbres simultaneously.

music Broadly speaking, sounds organized to express a wide variety of human emotions.

musical theater (musical) A hybrid form of twentieth-century American musical entertainment that incorporates elements of vaudeville, operetta, jazz, and popular vocal.

music drama Wagner's designation for his operas. musicology The scholarly report of music and its historical contexts.

musique concrete Natural sounds that accept been recorded electronically.

mute A mechanical device used with string and brass instruments to conceal the tone.

nationalism A nineteenth-century political move that led in music to the frequent use of national folk songs, styles, and historical subjects.

natural (ane) In musical notation, a sign -- natural -- indicating that the preceding accidental applied to this note is to be cancelled; (2) the proper name given to such a note, for example, C natural .

neoclassicism A twentieth-century move characterized by a selective and eclectic revival of the formal proportions and economical means of eighteenth century music.

neumatic In plainchant, a mode in which each syllable of text receives several notes.

neume The stemless symbols used in medieval sources to notate plainchant (see Figure four.12).

nocturne ("night piece") A nineteenth-century character piece for piano.

non-imitative counterpoint Same as unequal-voiced counterpoint.

non-legato The slight separation of adjacent notes.

notation (1) A sound with a specific pitch and elapsing; (2) in musical notation, the symbol (e.grand., J) for such a sound; (3) a single key on a keyboard.

octave The interval in which one pitch is doubled (or halved) in frequency by another pitch. The octave is found in near all music systems.

Office (Divine) The eight daily worship services, apart from the Mass, in the Roman Catholic Church.

ondes martenot An early electronic instrument invented in the late 1920s by Maurice Martenot.

opera A drama set to music; the dominant form of Western music from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

opera buffa A comic form of eighteenth-century Italian opera featuring everyday characters involved in outlandish plot intrigues.

opera seria A serious, heroic form of eighteenth century opera featuring historical or mythological figures in stereotypical plots stressing the tension between love and duty.

operetta A light, entertaining version of Romantic opera with spoken dialogue between numbers.

opus A "work"; opus numbers were introduced by publishers in the seventeenth century to identify each of a composer'due south works.

oratorio (English) A musical entertainment unremarkably on a sacred subject and including recitatives, arias, choruses, and an overture.

orchestration The designation of what instruments are to play what voices or notes in a composition. The process of orchestrating is ofttimes referred to as scoring.

Ordinary of the Mass In the Roman Cosmic liturgy, the five items (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) that arc role of every commemoration of the Mass.

organ An instrument in which air forced through pipes past mechanical means is controlled by i or more keyboards, including a foot-operated pedal keyboard.

organum The earliest type of medieval polyphonic music, in which voices were added above a plainchant.

decoration An embellishment, such every bit a trill, used to decorate a melodic line.

ostinato A brief pattern repeated over and over again at the same pitch, ofttimes in the bass.

overtones The spectrum of the higher-pitched frequencies that accompany the fundamental of whatsoever pitch and determine its tone colour (also chosen harmonic or partials).

overture An instrumental piece that precedes a dramatic piece of work such as an opera (some overtures are nevertheless contained compositions).

paraphrase The do by Renaissance composers of embellishing or elaborating a cantus firmus in polyphonic song works.

parlante Nineteenth-century operatic style in which the voices declaim in a rapid, speechlike fashion against a backdrop of tune and accompaniment.

part (i) One of the voices in a polyphonic work; (2) the written music for a single player in an ensemble.

partial Aforementioned equally overtone.

passacaglia Bizarre technique in which a brief melodic idea repeats over and over while the other voices are varied freely.

passage piece of work Descriptive term for figuration consisting of rapid runs and scales, mutual in keyboard music.

patch chords On early on synthesizers, the cables required to connect diverse components.

PCM Pulse-code modulation. A more sophisticated method of sampling introduced into the consumer synthesizer market in the late 1980s.

pedal board An organ'south human foot-operated keyboard.

pedal signal Long-held tones, unremarkably in the bass of a polyphonic passage.

pentatonic calibration A five-note scale found in numerous non-Western musics and adopted as an exotic element by many twentieth-century Western composers.

percussion Instruments, either tuned or untuned, that produce sounds by beingness struck, rattled, or scraped. Common percussion include drums, cymbals, and bells.

functioning directions Words or symbols provided by composers to instruct performers in how their music is to be played, including articulation, dynamics, expression, and phrasing.

period The musical equivalent of a paragraph. period instrument An musical instrument of a blazon that was in use at the time a work was originally performed. phrase The coherent segments that make upwards a melody; roughly equivalent to a sentence in prose.

phrasing The way in which a performer organizes and presents the parts of a limerick.

piano A keyboard instrument whose tone is produced past hammers striking strings tightly stretched over a large soundboard. A human foot pedal controls the damping of the strings.

pianoforte; pianissimo Soft; very soft. pianoforte trio A chamber work for pianoforte and two other instruments, usually violin and cello. pitch (1) The high and low of sounds, measured in acoustical frequencies; (two) a detail notation, such as middle C.

pizzicato Playing a string musical instrument that is usually bowed by plucking the strings with the finger.

plainchant (plainsong, Gregorian chant) Monophonic unison music sung during Catholic church services since the Middle Ages.

poles of attraction A term introduced by Stravinsky to describe the harmonic equilibrium of his neoclassical works.

polyphony; polyphonic (po-lif-ony; poly-fon-ick)A musical texture in which the individual voices move independently of ane another.

polyrhythm A texture in which the rhythms of various voices seem to exist independently of one another.

popular A generic term for pop music in gimmicky America, overlapping but not identical with rock.

postmodern A term adopted around the mid- 1970s to describe our current eclectic, experimental age.

prelude An introductory piece (though Chopin and other nineteenth-century composers wrote contained preludes).

premiere The commencement public operation of a musical or dramatic work.

prepared piano In contemporary music, the modifying of a traditional grand pianoforte by such techniques as placing various objects between the strings.

presto ; prestissimo Very fast; extremely fast.

primary area In a motion in sonata form, the first stage in an exposition; establishes the tonic key with i or more themes.

program music An instrumental work associated explicitly by the composer with a story or other extramusical idea.

Proper of the Mass The parts of the Mass that vary from day to mean solar day according to the church calendar.

punk A descriptive term adopted by the most rebellious heavy metal bands and their followers.

quarter tone Half a semitone.

quartet (1) A slice for four singers or instrumentalists; (ii) a grouping of four singers or instrumentalists.

quintet (i) A piece for v singers or instrumentalists; (2) a grouping of five singers or instrumentalists.

ragtime A blazon of popular American music, usually for pianoforte, that arose around 1900 and contributed to the emergence of jazz.

range The pitch distance between the lowest note and the highest notation of an musical instrument, a composition, or an individual function.

recapitulation The third principal section of a motion in sonata form whose office is to resolve the harmonic conflicts set up in the exposition and development.

recitative A flexible way of vocal delivery employed in opera, oratorio, and cantata and tailored to the accents and rhythms of the text.

reduction The compression of a complex, multi-stave score onto one or two staves.

reed In wind instruments such as the clarinet and oboe, a small vibrating chemical element made of cane that serves every bit all (double reed) or office (single reed) of the mouthpiece.

register The relative location within the range of a voice or an instrument, such as "the piercing upper register of the oboe. "

resolution A move from a racket to a consonance.

balance (I) In music, a brief silence; (ii) in musical notation, a sign indicating such a silence.

retransition In sonata form, the passage that leads from the harmonic instability of the development to the stability of the recapitulation.

retrograde Playing a theme backward.

rhythm (1) The pattern in time created by the incidence and elapsing of individual sounds; (2) used more loosely to refer to a particular rhythm, for example, "a dotted rhythm." rhythm & blues (R&B) A term coined in 1949 to draw the heavily rhythmic urban blues cultivated mainly past Midwestern African-American musicians.

rhythmic background The subdivisions of beats within a regular meter.

rhythmic foreground The regular beats provided by meter.

ripieno The largest of the two instrumental groups in a Bizarre concerto grosso.

ritard ; ritardando Slowing down the tempo.

ritornello (Italian, "the footling thing that returns") A recurring theme in eighteenth-century arias and concertos.

ritornello form Baroque instrumental course based on recurrences of a ritornello.

rock'n'curl(stone) Style of pop vocal music, frequently for dancing, that developed in the United States and England during the 1950s, characterized by a hard, driving duple meter and amplified instrumental accessory. Currently the most widespread musical style in the world.

rondo A musical course in which a main theme alternates with other themes or sections, for case, A-B-A-C-A.

circular A elementary sung canon in which all voices enter on the same annotation subsequently the same time interval.

rubato "Robbed" time; the subtle pressing forward and holding back the tempo in performance.

sampling The chapters of a synthesizer to extrapolate from a single instance a homogeneous timbre over a wide pitch range.

scale An array of fixed, ordered pitches bounded by two notes an octave apart. The mutual Western scales contain vii notes; in not-Western cultures, scales may contain fewer or more than 7 notes.

scherzo (Italian, "joke") A faster, often humorous transformation of a minuet, introduced into symphonies past Beethoven.

score The complete musical notation of a limerick, especially for an ensemble; the private parts are lined up vertically.

scoring The procedure of orchestration.

secondary area In a movement in sonata grade, the theme or group of themes that follows the transition and establishes the new key in the exposition.

semitone Same every bit one-half pace.

sequence (ane) The repetition of a musical idea at progressively college or lower pitches; (2) a form of medieval chant.

sequencing On a synthesizer, programming a series of sounds.

serialist The technique, introduced by Schoenberg, of basing a composition on a series, or tone row. Boulez and others take extended serialism to rhythm and timbre.

shape The interrelationship through fourth dimension of the parts or sections of a piece. Standardized shapes are commonly referred to equally forms.

sharp (i) In musical notation, a sign (#) indicating that the note it precedes is to be played a half footstep higher; (ii) the means of designating particular notes, for example, F#.

elementary meter A meter in which the main beats arc subdivided into twos, such equally two/4 or 3/iv.

Singspiel ("sung play") German folk or comic opera in which arias, ensembles, and choruses arc interspersed with spoken dialogue.

slur (1) In musical notation, a curved line connecting notes that are to exist played legato; (2) in performance, the playing of legato.

sonata A chamber piece of work in several movements; in the Bizarre, typically for iii parts (the continuo office normally requiring two instruments); in later on periods, for ane or two instruments.

sonata-concerto form A hybrid of Baroque ritornello form and sonata grade often used in the Classical concerto.

sonata form A musical course or manner, originating in the eighteenth century, based on successive stages of stability, tension, and resolution; the most influential form adult during the age of tonality.

sonata-rondo form A synthesis of sonata and rondo forms, especially popular in finales of Classical instrumental works.

song cycle A collection of poems set to music and tied together by mood or story line.

sonority A general term for sound quality, either of a brief moment or of an entire composition.

soprano (i) The high woman'due south (or male child'south) voice; (2)the highest voice in a polyphonic texture.

spinning-out A translation of the German Fortspinnung, in reference to the single-minded use in Baroque music of a brief motive to generate a long, continuous phrase.

Sprechstimme A song delivery, developed by Schoenberg, intermediate between oral communication and song.

staccato (1) In musical notation, a dot placed above a notehead to indicate that information technology is to receive only well-nigh half its regular value; (2) in performance, the pronounced separation of adjacent notes.

staff (plural, staves) In musical notation, the five horizontal lines on which i or more than voices are notated.

stanza In vocal works, poetic units 2 lines or longer of equal length and accent pattern, frequently sung to the aforementioned music.

stem In musical annotation, the vertical line fastened to a notehead.

stop On the organ, hand-operated levers that actuate different means of sound production, thereby varying the tone colour.

stop (double, triple, quadruple) In string playing, the sounding of 2, iii, or 4 strings at once.

stretto In a fugue, starting time an entry of a subject earlier a previous entry has finished.

string quartet (1) Ensemble consisting of ii violins, viola, and cello; (2) a work composed for this ensemble.

strings Family of bowed or plucked instruments in which thin strings are stretched over a wooden frame.

strophic course Vocal course in which each stanza of a poem is gear up to the same music. structure A term oft used in music to hateful shape or form.

style The result of the interaction among rhythm, tune, harmony, texture, color, and shape that gives the music of a particular menses or composer its distinctiveness.

stylistic modulation In gimmicky music, the shifting among detached styles (for instance, Renaissance and Viennese Classicism) within the aforementioned composition.

subdominant (1) The quaternary degree of the diatonic calibration- (two) the triad congenital on this degree; (three) the key oriented around this caste.

subject The chief theme of a fugue.

suite (I) A work consisting of a collection of dances, popular in the Baroque; (2) an abbreviated version of a longer piece of work, for example, the suite from the picture Star Wars.

swing (I)A style of jazz playing whose flexible, improvised rhythms resist notation; (2) proper name used to describe large ring jazz from the 1930s and 1940s. syllabic In plainchant, a mode in which each syllable of text receives a single note. symbolism French literary move of the late nineteenth century favoring suggestion and innuendo rather than realism or naturalism.

symphonic poem Same as tone Poem.

symphony A big orchestral composition in several movements- a dominant class of public music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. syncopation The accenting, within a well-defined meter, of weaker beats or portions of beats. synthesizer An electronic device that can create a wide variety of sounds in response to the user's instructions.

arrangement A group of staves connected past a brace, indicating that they are to be played simultaneously.

tail The end of a theme.

tailpiece The holder to which the strings are fastened at the lower terminate of the body of a string musical instrument.

tango A duple-meter trip the light fantastic from Argentina that was popular in Paris in the early twentieth century.

tempo (Italian, "time") The speed of a piece of music, unremarkably reckoned past the rate of its beats. tenor (one) The high male voice; (ii) the second-lowest voice in a four-part texture; (3) the long-held voice in a medieval organum.

ternary form A 3-part musical construction (A-B-A) based on statement (A), dissimilarity (B), and repetition (A).

texture The musical weave of a composition, such equally homophonic or contrapuntal

thematic anticipation The Romantic practice of introducing fragments of a theme before presenting it in its entirety.

thematic transformation A Romantic technique that preserves the essential pitch identity of a theme while altering its rhythm or character.

theme A self-independent melodic idea on which musical works are frequently based.

theme and variations Popular form in which a theme is followed by variations that preserve the phrase lengths and harmonization of the theme while varying its rhythms, melodies, and textures.

through-composed A descriptive term for a vocal or an instrumental movement in which there is no large scale repetition.

timbre (tam-burr) Same as tone color.

fourth dimension signature The two numbers that appear in a score immediately after the clefs. The upper number indicates how many beats each measure is to receive; the lower number indicates the value of the note that receives each beat.

toccata An improvisatory style of keyboard music especially pop during the Baroque.

tonality ; tonal A harmonic system in which triads are arranged hierarchically around a central triad called the tonic.

tone A more general term for pitch or annotation.

tone duster The simultaneous sounding of adjacent pitches.

tone color (timbre) The acoustical properties of a sound, including its envelope and the distribution of overtones above the fundamental. tone poem (symphonic poem) A slice of orchestral plan music in ane long movement. tone row In series music, the ordering of all twelve notes of the chromatic calibration to serve as the basis of a limerick.

tonic (1) The first caste, or central note, of the diatonic scale; (2) the triad built on this degree; (3) the key oriented around this degree. full serialist The application of serial techniques to all aspects of musical style.

transcription An arrangement, normally for a solo instrument such every bit a piano, of an orchestral or song work.

transition In a move in sonata form, the unstable stage in an exposition that undertakes the modulation from the tonic to the new key.

transpose ; transposition To move a passage (or section or entire work) from one pitch level to some other.

treble clef The clef (@) in the upper staff that shows pitches mostly above heart C.

tremolo In cord playing, repetitions of a tone produced by rapid alternation betwixt up-and-down strokes of the bow.

triad A chord consisting of three pitches constructed effectually intervals of interlocking thirds (on the white notes, this amounts to every other annotation).

trill Musical ornament that consists of ii notes a half step or a whole step apart played in rapid alternation.

trio (1) A piece of work for iii performers; (2) the 2nd section of a Baroque dance such as a minuet.

trio sonata A Baroque sonata for two treble instruments and continuo, generally requiring four performers.

triple meter The regular grouping of beats into threes, as in a flit.

triplet The grouping of three notes per beat, usually in contrast to the standard group of two notes per crush.

tritone A anomalous interval consisting of three whole steps, known in medieval music equally "the devil in music."

trope An addition to the plainchant, usually in the course of new text fix to either existing or new music.

troubadors , trouveres Poet/musicians, usually aloof, agile in southern and northern French republic during the Eye Ages.

tune A less formal term for a melody, specially a catchy melody.

tutti (Italian, "all") The full ensemble.

under-3rd cadency A fourteenth-century cadence, closely associated with Francesco Landini, in which the tune proceeds from the seventh to the sixth caste of the modal scale before rising a third to the tonic annotation.

diff-voiced counterpoint (non-imitative counterpoint) A musical texture in which independent voices of different character compete for attending.

unison A descriptive term for music sung or played at the same pitch by ii different voices or instruments.

unit of measurement pulse A rhythmic technique in which meter is replaced by a focus on the shortest rhythmic value.

upbeat A weak or unaccented beat that anticipates a stiff downbeat.

variation (1) Generally, an contradistinct version of a rhythm, motive, or theme; (two) in theme and variations, each regular department following the theme, in which the phrase lengths and harmonization remain true (or close) to the theme while the rhythms, melodies, and textures alter.

verismo A descriptive term for a realistic, ofttimes sensational, type of late-Romantic Italian opera, whose disreputable characters are caught upwardly in lust, greed, betrayal, or revenge.

vernacular dramas A sung monophonic play presented in the Middle Ages by roving minstrels, who freely mixed secular texts, instrumental music, and plainchant.

poesy One of two sections (verse and bridge) of many American popular songs, particularly mutual in the sequence verse-verse-bridge-verse.

vibrato On string instruments, small but rapid fluctuations in pitch used to intensify a sound.

virtuosity In a composition, a focus on exceptional technical demands; in a performance, a focus on exceptional technical display.

virtuoso A performer with exceptional technical skills.

vocalization (1) The man vox; (2) an independent line in any polyphonic piece.

walking bass A Baroque blueprint in which a bass part moves steadily in constant rhythms.

waltz A popular nineteenth-century dance in moderate to fast triple meter.

white noise Sounds containing every audible frequency at approximately the same intensity.

whole step (whole tone) An interval equal to two half steps.

whole-tone calibration An exotic non-Western scale employed by Debussy and other Western composers.

woodwinds A family unit of instruments, constructed largely of woods, that produce audio past means of blowing air across an aperture or through a vibrating reed.

word painting A technique that became prominent in the Renaissance, in which musical figures are used to stand for specific images-falling, sighing, weeping, rejoicing, and then forth.

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