IB Music HL: Middle Ages Vocab

Chapters 14 - 16

rondeau / ballade / virelai

• the love poem forms

• established the repetition theme

chanson

• courtly love poem writing

• often included palindromic form

• had puzzles and riddles hidden within the music

ars antiqua

• what was replaced by ars nova

ars nova

• AKA: new art

• a musical style in the early 1300s in france and italy

• notable composer is Guilaume de Machaut

• notable styles: chansons rondeau ballade and virelai

trouveres

• poets / musicians in the north of France

• both south and north are inventors of love songs and chronicles of the crusades

troubadours

• inventors in the south of france are poets / musicians

• both south and north are inventors of love songs and chronicles of the crusades

rhythmic mode

• fixed pattern of long of short notes that is repeated to varied

• two three or four voice parts sung in fixed rhythmic patterns

organum

• early form of polyphony

• paris’s cathedral of notre dame was a center for this

• based on preexisting chants

polyphony

• combination of two or more simultaneous melodic lines

• originally improvised and eventually notated

• featured in traditional music

islamic chant

• christian music themes

• idea of plainchant music types

sung worship

• shared feature among many world cultures

acapella

• voices only

• no instrument accompaniment

melismatic

• several distinct pitches assigned to a single syllable

neume

• a symbol that notates two to four notes in the same syllable

• each syllable is sung for two to four notes

neumatic

• when one syllable of chant is one neume

syllabic

• when the syllables of a word represent an individual musical note

modes

• a series of seven musical scales

• two half steps

• five whole steps.

plainchant

• AKA: chant

• monophonic nonmetric melody set in one of the church modes / scales

• early Christian church music