Music Composition
107 flashcards by MentisLibrary
How pieces are built: motif and phrase, harmony and voice leading, counterpoint, form from binary to sonata, texture, orchestration ranges, and the working habits composers use to finish a piece.
- What is a motif?
- The smallest recognisable musical idea, a few notes with a distinctive rhythm or contour, that a composer develops into phrases and themes.
- What is a phrase?
- A musical sentence, usually two, four or eight bars long, that ends at a point of rest called a cadence.
- What is a period (antecedent and consequent)?
- A pair of phrases in which the first, the antecedent, ends on a weaker cadence, usually a half cadence, and the second, the consequent, answers it with a stronger one, usually authentic.
- What is a sentence in phrase structure?
- An eight-bar design: a two-bar basic idea, its repetition (often varied or transposed), then a four-bar continuation that fragments the idea and drives to a cadence.
- What is melodic contour?
- The overall shape of a melody's rises and falls: an arch, a descent, a wave.
- Conjunct vs disjunct motion
- Stepwise (conjunct) motion is the norm in melody; a large leap (disjunct) is usually followed by a step in the opposite direction to fill the gap.
- What is a sequence?
- Immediate repetition of a motif at a different pitch level, usually a step higher or lower, in the same voice.
- Where does the climax of a melody usually sit?
- At its highest or most intense point, placed once, typically two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the phrase or piece.
- Passing tone vs neighbour tone
- Both are non-chord tones: a passing tone fills the gap between two chord tones by step; a neighbour tone steps away from a chord tone and returns to it.
- What is a suspension?
- A note held over from the previous chord that becomes dissonant against the new chord and then resolves down by step, labelled by its intervals above the bass such as 4-3 or 7-6.
- What is an appoggiatura?
- A leaning note approached by leap and resolved by step, usually on a strong beat, which creates an accented dissonance.
- Name the main motivic transformations.
- Fragmentation breaks the motif into pieces, inversion flips its intervals, augmentation lengthens its note values, diminution shortens them, and retrograde plays it backwards.
- What is a hook?
- In popular music, the short, catchy phrase, whether melodic, lyrical or rhythmic, designed to be remembered, usually delivered in the chorus.
- What is prosody in songwriting?
- The fit between words and music: stressed syllables land on strong beats and on higher or longer notes, and phrase lengths match the sense of the lyric.
- Range vs tessitura
- Range is the total span from a part's lowest to highest note; tessitura is the zone where the line mostly sits.
- How do Roman numeral chord labels work?
- Chords are named by scale degree, uppercase for major and lowercase for minor, with dim for diminished: in a major key I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, vii dim.
- What are the tonic, subdominant and dominant functions?
- Tonic chords (I, vi, iii) are home and rest; subdominant or predominant chords (IV, ii) move away; dominant chords (V, vii dim) create tension that pulls back to the tonic.
- Name the four common cadences.
- Authentic (V to I), plagal (IV to I), half (ending on V) and deceptive (V to vi).
- What is a circle-of-fifths progression?
- A chain of root movements by descending fifth (or ascending fourth), such as vi, ii, V, I, the strongest root motion in tonal music.
- What is a ii-V-I?
- The most common jazz progression: the supertonic seventh (ii7), the dominant seventh (V7) and the tonic major seventh (Imaj7).
- What is a secondary dominant?
- A dominant chord borrowed to lead to a chord other than the tonic, written V/x and read five of x.
- What is modulation?
- A change of key confirmed by a cadence in the new key; the pivot-chord method passes through a chord common to both keys.
- What is a pivot chord?
- A chord that belongs to both the old and the new key and serves as the hinge of a modulation.
- What is modal mixture?
- Borrowing chords from the parallel minor or major key, such as iv, flat VI or flat VII in a major key.
- What is the Neapolitan chord?
- A major chord built on the lowered second degree, usually in first inversion (flat II6), used as a predominant before V.
- What is a pedal point?
- A sustained note, usually in the bass, held while the harmonies above it change, often creating passing dissonance.
- What is voice leading?
- The way individual voices move from one chord to the next: mostly by step, keeping common tones and, in traditional styles, avoiding parallel fifths and octaves.
- Why are parallel fifths avoided in common-practice writing?
- Two voices moving in parallel perfect fifths or octaves fuse into one, which weakens the independence of the lines.
- How does figured bass label inversions?
- Numbers under the bass show intervals above it: 6 for a first-inversion triad, 6/4 for second inversion, 7 for a root-position seventh, 6/5, 4/3 and 4/2 for its three inversions.
- What is the cadential six-four?
- A tonic chord in second inversion placed on a strong beat before V, which decorates the dominant and is often written V6/4 to 5/3.