Glossary

Non-representational music.

Homophonic compositions featuring a solo singer over the accompaniment. Arias are very melodic and primarily utilized in operas, cantatas, and oratorios.

Playing the notes of a chord one at a time instead of simultaneously.

Music that seeks to avoid both the traditional rules of harmony and the use of chords or scales that provide a tonal center.

Performance dance.

Continuous realization of harmony throughout a musical piece, usually by a harpsichord and/or cello. The Basso continuo provides a framework/template for harmonic accompaniments.

“Beautiful singing,” referring to singing styles of nineteenth century opera.

Animated aria often conveying strong emotions. Follows a cantabile.

Theatrical entertainment in a club, casino, or restaurant. The audience is typically seated and is often eating or drinking.

The ending of a musical phrase providing a sense of closure, often through the use of one chord that resolves to another.

Polyphonic treatment of melody that harmonizes a melody with a variation of itself.

Slower and flexible aria, precedes a cabaletta.

Person who leads worship by singing.

Music, such as art songs, piano character pieces, and string quartets, primarily performed in small performing spaces, often for personal entertainment.

Music with elements not determined until performance.

Lyric-driven French songs, usually secular.

Written jazz arrangement.

Synthesized electronic music from or emulating sound chips.

A repeating series of chords.

The simultaneous sounding of three or more pitches. Like intervals, chords can be consonant or dissonant.

Musical pitches which move up or down by successive half-steps, or music which uses notes that are not a part of the predominant scale of a composition or one of its sections.

Optional final section of a movement that reasserts the home key of the movement and provides a sense of conclusion.

Sometimes called “light opera;” light or comic in nature, with a happy ending and sometimes spoken dialogue.

Rock album with songs that follow a unified theme or idea.

A small group of soloists in a concerto grosso.

A composition for a soloist or a group of soloists and an orchestra, generally in three movements with fast, slow, and fast tempos, respectively.

A musical composition for a small group of soloists and orchestra.

A melody that moves mostly by step, in a smooth manner.

A term used to describe intervals and chords that tend to sound sweet and pleasing to our ears. Consonance, as opposed to dissonance, is stable and needs no resolution.

Music that plays during film sequence.

The middle section of a sonata-form movement in which the themes and key areas introduced in the exposition are developed.

A melody that jumps, with larger intervals between notes.

Intervals and chords that tend to sound harsh to our ears. Dissonance is often used to create tension and instability, and the interplay between dissonance and consonance provides a sense of harmonic and melodic motion in music.

A one-movement work, usually in sonata-allegro form, that presented a musical narrative. This often preceded an opera, play, or some other event.

The variation in the volume of musical sound.

Music created by electronic machines, synthesized sounds, computers, etc.

The gradual learning of a group or culture’s values and practices.

Tuning by dividing the octave into equal parts.

Two-stringed Chinese bowed instrument.

Lively Medieval dance in triple meter.

Evoking foreign cultures.

First section of a sonata form movement, in which the themes and key areas of the movement are introduced; the section normally modulates from the home key to a different key.

Dissonant, abstract style that rejects traditional depictions of beauty.

A song form used often in folk music, which is used to tell a story that usually contains a moral or lesson.

The structure of the phrases and sections within a musical composition.

Loud dynamic.

Form written in an imitative contrapuntal style in multiple parts. Fugues are based on their original tune, which is called the subject. The subject is then imitated and overlapped by the other parts called the answer, countersubject, stretto, and episode.

Traditional Indonesian ensemble of percussion instruments, often bronze.

“Total work of art,” comprised of different artistic forms.

Interaction between varied nations and cultures.

Opera with 4-5 acts, large orchestras, and extravagant staging. Based on historical events.

The use of visual symbols alongside or replacing traditional music notation.

Text set to a melody written in monophonic texture without notated rhythms, sung by medieval European Christian monks and nuns.

Early twentieth century cultural and intellectual movement of African American arts, literature, and politics based in Harlem in New York City.

Any simultaneous combination of tones and the rules governing those combinations.

An early form of country music, Hillbilly Music was an alternative to the jazz and dance music of the 1920s and was portrayed as wholesome music of the “good old days.”

Music where the melody is supported by a chordal accompaniment that moves in the same rhythm. Homophony is generally the opposite of polyphony where the voices imitate and weave with each other.

Music that is well-suited for a particular instrument or voice.

Art or music based on the composer’s impression of an object, concept, or event.

The distance in pitch between any two notes.

“Guiding motive” associated with a specific character, theme, or locale in a music drama. First associated with the music of Richard Wagner.

A person who writes the libretto, the text or actual words of an opera, musical, cantata, or oratorio.

German art song, particularly with solo voice and piano accompaniment.

Background music that repeats.

Japanese concept of a pause or emptiness.

A musical piece for several solo voices set to a short poem, often about love.

Catholic celebration of the Eucharist consisting of liturgical texts set to music.

More than one note sung during one syllable of the text.

A succession of notes in musical phrases or compositions.

Music that uses intervals smaller than the smallest standard intervals in Western equal-tempered music: half-steps or semitones.

A repetition of short musical ideas and phrases that creates a hypnotic effect.

A form of American entertainment that consists of singing, dancing, and telling jokes that often perpetuated racist stereotypes.

Philosophical and artistic trend that seeks to abandon past traditions for new ideas.

A style of sung music with a solo voice accompanied by instruments, particularly related to the development of opera in seventeenth-century Italy.

Musical texture comprised of one melodic line. A melodic line may be sung or played by one person or 100 people.

Highly varied and polyphonic sacred choral musical composition.

Sound and silence organized in time.

A musical movement that arose in the twentieth century as a reaction against romanticism and which sought to recapture classical ideals like symmetry, order, and restraint.

Early theater with admission price of a nickel, or five cents.

A staged musical drama for voices and orchestra. Operas are fully blocked and performed in costume with sets. Operas utilize arias and recitatives without narration.

A major work with religious or contemplative characters for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. Oratorios do not utilize blocking, costumes, or scenery.

Plainchant medieval melody accompanied by least one additional melody.

Prevalently repeating phrase or musical idea.

Soft dynamic.

Two or more different time signatures played at the same time.

Musical texture that simultaneously features two or more relatively independent and important melodic lines.

Two or more different rhythms played at the same time.

A compositional technique where two or more instruments or voices in different keys (tonal centers) perform together at the same time.

A rejection of traditions and boundaries in art.

Harmonically simple chords used in rock music.

A piano with objects inserted between or on the strings to produce a variety of sounds.

Primary female vocalist in opera production.

Musical movement that arose as a reaction against musical impressionism and which focused on the use of strong rhythmic pulse, distinct musical ideas, and a tonality based on one central tone as a unifying factor instead of a central key or chord progression.

Someone who, as a child, creates an output of work or ability comparable in quality to an adult expert.

Instrumental music intended to represent something extra-musical such as a poem, narrative, drama, or picture, or the ideas, images, or sounds therein.

Information in a concert program about a piece of music.

Program music in the form of a multi-movement composition for orchestra.

Early twentieth century recordings made by and for African Americans.

A pattern of notes with various associations used as the basis for improvisation in Indian classical music.

Third and final second of a sonata-form movement, in which the themes of the exposition return, now in the home key of the movement.

An operatic number using speech-like melodies and rhythms, performed using a flexible tempo, to sparse accompaniment, most often provided by the basso continuo. Recitatives are often performed between arias and have texts that tend to be descriptive and narrating.

The low, medium, and high sections of an instrument or vocal range.

A reflection or echo of sound as it bounces off surfaces before decaying.

The way the music is organized in respect to time.

Repeated unifying sections found in between the solo sections of a concerto grosso.

Instrumental form consisting of the alternation of a refrain “A” with contrasting sections (“B,” “C,” “D,” etc.). Rondos are often the final movements of string quartets, classical symphonies, concerti, and sonata (instrumental solos).

Money paid to composers for sales or performances of compositions.

The momentary speeding up or slowing down of the tempo within a melody line, literally “robbing” time from one note to give to another.

Religious; music used for church.

Gathering places for knowledge and amusement.

Late nineteenth-century English comic opera.

A series of pitches, ordered by the interval between its notes.

Nineteenth-century operatic combination of a recitative (“scena”) plusaria. Here the aria generally has two parts, a slower cantabile and a faster cabaletta.

Form that prominently replaced the minuet in symphonies and strings quartets of the nineteenth century. Like the minuet, scherzos are ternary forms and have a triple feel, although they tend to be somewhat faster in tempo than the minuet.

An event to perform and celebrate the music of Franz Schubert.

Non-religious; music used in courts or public spaces.

A bamboo flute used in traditional Japanese music.

A plucked string instrument used in Indian classical music.

Popular Cuban music that combines Spanish and African influences.

Composition for a solo instrument or an instrument with piano accompaniment, generally in multiple movements with contrasting tempos.

A form often found in the first and last movements of sonatas, symphonies, and string quartets, consisting of three parts – exposition, development, and recapitulation.

A type of Black American Christian song.

Well-known early popular music songs.

A composition that uses the repetition of the same music (“strophes”) for successive texts.

Slight variations from one stanza to another.

The act of disrupting the normal pattern of accents in a piece of music by emphasizing what would normally be weak beats.

A pair of hand drums used in Indian classical music.

A repeating rhythmic pattern that that forms the rhythmic foundation for Indian classical music.

Plucked string instrument with four or five strings each tuned to one tone of the basic scale and plucked to produce a continuous, unvarying drone accompaniment.

The speed at which the beat is played.

Different sections of a piece of music having a set volume unique for that particular section.

The ways in which musical lines of a musical piece interact.

The presentation of a theme and then variations upon it. The theme may be illustrated as A, with any number of variations following it – A’, A’’, A’’’, A’’’’, etc.

A movement or composition consisting of new music throughout, without repetition of internal sections.

The tone color or tone quality of a sound.

Group of late nineteenth and early twentieth songwriters and music publishers who helped shape American popular music.

Instrumental piece, meaning “to touch” in Italian. Generally involves fast or technically impressive passages.

Chord containing at least three adjacent notes.

Also called symphonic poem. A one-movement work for orchestra that conveys a story, event, or experience. Musically, it’s very similar to a dramatic overture, except that the tone poem is a stand-alone work. It doesn’t lead into a larger work.

The most important pitch of a key. The note from which the other pitches are derived and has a feeling of home or stability.

Poet-musicians in Southern France.

Poet-musicians in Northern France.

Derives musical elements such as pitch, duration, dynamics, and instrumentation from a series of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale.

Music that accompanies a film scene. Typically in the background to help set a mood or scene.

Opera genre that highlights “realism.”

Someone with outstanding technical talents and skills.

Utilized by composers to represent poetic images musically. For example, an ascending melodic line would portray the text “ascension to heaven.” Or a series of rapid notes would represent running.

A type of folk song devised to help groups of people perform physical work. The music usually uses the tempo of the work itself and was sung by lumberjacks, railroad workers, and prison chain gangs, among others.