IB Music HL: Romantic Era Vocab

Chapters: 37, 38, 39, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50,

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

• A spiritual written before the 1840s

• may have been created by a slave named Choctaw Willis who worked at a native american boarding school in Oklahoma

• A white reverend heard the song and popularized it within the African American community

• This song was arranged and rearranged multiple times by different artists of the early 20th century

Harlem Renaissance

• An attempt by African American artists and philosophers to claim a “high culture” space for their people in order to counteract the racism they experienced in America

• This led to spirituals being presented alongside European music as valid american art

• This was a time where African American writers and Musicians gained popularity in the process of finding where their art fit into the European centered world which they lived in

Spiritual

• Semi-improvised tradition of sacred songs

• developed by black slaves and freedmen

• often involved monophonic signing with some heterophonic elaboration

• were full of rhythmic and melodic traits which were very different from the European norms

Ring Shout

• An extended call and response

• would build into a religious fervor

• developed by slaves from African traditions

Camp meetings

• Days of weeks when African American and European American people gathered to sing hymns of praise

A-B-A’

• Statement - departure - return (a familiar pattern for orchestral work)

Ninth chord

• A set of five notes in which the interval between the lowest and highest tones is a ninth

• The effect was one of hovering between tonalities, creating elusive effects that evoke the misty outlines of impressionist painting

Impressionism

• A musical style of composition in which clarity of structure and theme is subordinate to harmonic effects

• characteristically using the whole-tone scale

• Impressionism is also a literary or artistic style that seeks to capture a feeling or experience

Melodrama

• One element that characterized the German musical theater of the early 1800s

Leitmotifs

• Recurring themes, that represent a person, place, or idea. (leading Motives)

Music Dramas

• Integrated music, poetry, drama, and spectacle

Singpiel

• Music genre, of a light, comic drama with spoken dialogue (in Germany)

Bel Canto

• Beautiful Singing

Opera Buffa

• Comic Opera

Opera Seria

• Serious opera

Shakespeare’s Comedy

• A type of Shakespeare

• EX: A Midsummer Nights Dream

Symphonic Poem

• AKA: Tone Poem

• Formed out of the composers need for large orchestral forms

• A program music for orchestra in one movement with contrasting sections that develop a poetic idea, suggest a scene, or create a mood

• Most common type of orchestral program music through the second half of the century

Incidental Music

• A form of program music

• Consisting of an overture and a series of pieces performed between the acts of a play and during important scenes

Overture

• A rousing orchestral piece in one movement

• Due to the popularity of program overtures, overtures became separate concert pieces and eventually disassociate from opera

Program Overture

• A type of program to come out of an opera house

• Where the overture served as an introduction to an opera or play

Character Piece

• Short lyric piano piece, equivalent to the song

Rubato of “robbed time”

• In which certain liberties are taken with the rhythm without upsetting the basic beat

Polonaises

• A slow dance of Polish origin

• in triple time

• consisting chiefly of an intricate march or procession

études

• Highly virtuosic study pieces

Minstrel shows

• Racially charged theatre through which songs were popularized

Minstrelsy

• A form of entertainment associated with minstrel shows

• featuring songs, dances, and formulaic comic routines based on stereotyped depictions of African Americans

• typically performed by white actors with blackened faces.

parlor songs

• Usually performed by amature musicians in parlors

• Often sweet, sentimental, and nostalgic.

Modified strophic

• The same melody may be repeated for two or three stanzas, with new material introduced when the poem requires it

through-composed

• Proceeds from beginning to end without repetitions of whole sections

Strophic Form

• The melody is repeated with every stanza/strophe of the poem

• hymns, carols, as well as most folk and popular songs are strophic

Song Cycle

• Groups of Lieder that were unified by a narrative thread or descriptive theme

The Lied

• A German-texted solo song

• generally with a piano accompaniment