Music History
109 flashcards by MentisLibrary
One thread from Gregorian chant to trap production. Eras, genres, instruments, and the figures who changed the sound, including the blues, bebop, reggae, punk, hip hop, and techno.
- Gregorian chant
- Unaccompanied single line sacred song in Latin, sung in the medieval Western church.
- Organum
- The earliest form of Western polyphony, adding one or more voices to a chant line.
- Ars Nova
- A fourteenth century French style with new rhythmic notation allowing greater independence between voices.
- Renaissance polyphony
- Vocal writing of several independent lines woven together, prized for smooth voice leading and clear text setting.
- Madrigal
- A secular vocal piece for several voices, often with vivid word painting.
- Basso continuo
- The continuous bass line plus keyboard or lute realization that underpins most Baroque music.
- Opera
- A staged drama sung throughout, combining music, text, acting, and design.
- Aria
- A self contained solo song in an opera or oratorio, usually reflecting on emotion rather than advancing the plot.
- Oratorio
- A large scale work for voices and orchestra on a sacred subject, performed without staging or costume.
- Fugue
- A contrapuntal form in which a subject is stated by one voice and then imitated in turn by the others.
- Sonata form
- The standard first movement plan of the Classical era: exposition, development, and recapitulation.
- The symphony
- A multi movement work for orchestra, standardized in the Classical era at four movements.
- The Classical style
- Music of roughly 1750 to 1820 favoring balanced phrases, clear tonality, and homophonic texture over Baroque density.
- Romanticism in music
- A nineteenth century turn toward personal expression, program music, expanded orchestras, and extremes of dynamics and chromaticism.
- Program music
- Instrumental music that depicts a story, scene, or idea supplied outside the music itself.
- Leitmotif
- A short recurring musical idea associated with a character, object, or concept, developed extensively by Wagner.
- Nationalism in nineteenth century music
- Composers drawing on folk melody, dance, and language to assert national identity.
- The Mighty Handful
- A group of five Russian composers, Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky Korsakov, and Borodin, who sought a distinctly Russian art music.
- Impressionism in music
- A French style around 1890 to 1920 using modal and whole tone scales, unresolved harmony, and color for its own sake.
- Atonality
- Music that avoids a tonal center, so no pitch functions as home.
- Twelve tone technique
- Schoenberg's method of composing with a fixed ordering of all twelve chromatic pitches, called a row.
- Serialism
- Composition that orders musical parameters by a predetermined series, extended after 1945 to rhythm, dynamics, and articulation.
- The Rite of Spring premiere
- Stravinsky's ballet caused an uproar at its 1913 Paris premiere, with its pounding irregular rhythms and harsh harmony.
- Minimalism in music
- A style built from repeated short patterns that change gradually, developed in the United States from the 1960s.
- Phasing
- A minimalist technique in which identical patterns played at slightly different speeds drift out of and back into alignment.
- Musique concrete
- Composition made by manipulating recorded sounds on tape rather than writing for instruments.
- Aleatoric music
- Music in which some element is left to chance or to the performer's choice.
- John Cage's 4'33"
- A piece in which the performer makes no deliberate sound, framing the ambient noise of the room as the content.
- The orchestra's four families
- Strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.
- Why is the piano called that?
- Its original name, pianoforte, describes its ability to play both soft and loud depending on how hard a key is struck.