Music History Unit 3 Terms

verismo

19th-century operatic trend that presents everyday people in familiar situations, often depicting sordid or brutal events.

impressionism

Late 19th-century term derived from art, used for music that evokes moods and visual images through color harmony and instrumental timbre.

expressionism

Early 20th-century term derived from art, in which music avoids all traditional forms of "beauty" in order to express deep personal feelings through
exaggerated gestures, angular melodies, and extreme dissonance.

popular music

Music, primarily intended as entertainment, that is sold in printed or recorded form. It is distinguished from folk music by being written down and marketed as a commodity, and from classical music by being centered on the performer and the performance, allowing great latitude in rearranging the notated music.

modernists

20th-century composers who broke away from the musical language of their predecessors and contemporaries while maintaining strong links to tradition.

octatonic scale/collection

A scale that alternates whole and half steps.

whole-tone scale/collection

A scale consisting of only whole steps.

neoclassicism

Trend in music from the 1910s to the 1950s in which composers revived, imitated, or evoked the styles, genres, and forms of pre-romantic music, especially those of the eighteenth century.

avant-garde

Term for music (and art) that is iconoclastic, irreverent, antagonistic, and nihilistic, seeking to overthrow established aesthetics.

futurism/futurists

20th-century movement that created music based on noise.

march

A piece in duple or 6/8 meter comprising an introduction and several strains, each repeated. Typically, there are two strains in the initial key followed by a trio in a key a fourth higher; the opening strains may or may not repeat after the trio.

blues

(1) African-American vocal genre that is based on a simple repetitive formula and characterized by a distinctive style of performance. (2) Twelve-bar blues.

call and response

Alternation of short phrases between a leader and a group; used especially for music in the African-American tradition.

jazz

A type of music developed mostly by African Americans in the early part of the 20th-century that combined elements of African, popular, and European musics, and that has evolved into a broad tradition encompassing many styles and featuring improvisation.

operetta

19th-century kind of light opera with spoken dialogue, originating in opéra bouffe.

spiritual

African American type of religious song that originated among southern slaves and was passed down through oral tradition, with texts often based on stories or images from the Bible.

rag

Instrumental work in ragtime style, usually in the form of a march.

ragtime

Musical style that features syncopated rhythm against a regular, marchlike bass.

chorus

The refrain of a popular song.

Tin Pan Alley

(1) Jocular name for a district in New York where numerous publishers specializing in popular songs were located from the 1880s through the 1950s. (2) Styles of American popular song from that era.

verse-refrain form

A form in vocal music in which two or more stanzas of poetry are each sung to the same music (the verse) and each is followed by the same refrain.

musical

Genre of musical theater that features songs and dance numbers in styles drawn from popular music in the context of a spoken play with a comic or romantic plot.

bebop/bop

A style of jazz appearing in New York in the 1940s that developed an enriched harmonic vocabulary and required an increased level of technical and improvisational skill to play rapid melodies and complicated rhythms.

diegetic/source music

In film, music that is heard or performed by the characters themselves.

nondiegetic music/underscoring

In film, background music that conveys to the viewer a mood or other aspect of a scene or character but is not heard by the characters themselves.

blue note

Slight drop or slide in pitch on the third, fifth, or seventh degree of a major scale, common in blues and jazz.

twelve-bar blues

Standard formula for the blues, with a harmonic progression in which the first four-measure phrase is on the tonic, the second phrase begins on the subdominant and ends on the tonic, and the third phrase starts on the dominant and returns to the tonic.

New Orleans jazz

Leading style of jazz just after World War I, which centers on group variation of a given tune, either improvised or in the style of improvisation.

big band

Type of large jazz ensemble popular between the World Wars, featuring brass, reeds, and rhythm sections, and playing prepared arrangements that included rhythmic unisons and coordinated dialogue between sections and soloists.

chorus

In jazz, a statement of the harmonic progression of the opening tune, over which one or more instruments play variants or new musical ideas.

rhythm section

In a jazz ensemble, the group of instruments that keeps the beat and fills in the background, usually piano or guitar, bass, and drums.

scat singing

Technique in jazz in which the performer sings nonsense syllables to an improvised or composed melody.

swing

A style of jazz originating in the 1930s that was characterized by large ensembles and hard-driving jazz rhythms played by the rhythm section.

contrafact

In jazz, a new melody composed over a harmonic progression borrowed from another song.

post-tonal

General term for music after 1900 that does not adhere to tonality but instead uses any of the new ways that composers found to organize pitch, from atonal to neotonal methods.

atonal/atonality

Terms for music that avoids establishing a central pitch or tonal center (such as the tonic in tonal music).

cantata

In later eras, a work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra in several movements but smaller than an oratorio.

chromatic saturation

The appearance of all twelve pitch-classes within a segment of music.

Sprechstimme

A vocal style developed by Arnold Schoenberg in
which the performer approximates the written pitches in the gliding tones of speech, while following the notated rhythm.

pitch-class

Any one of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, including its enharmonic equivalents, in any octave.

inversion

(1) In a melody or twelve-tone row, reversing the upward or downward direction of each interval while maintaining its size; or the new melody or row form that results. (2) In harmony, a distribution of the notes in a chord so that a note other than the root is the lowest note. (3) In counterpoint, reversing the relative position of two melodies, so that the one that had been lower is now above the other.

prime

In twelve-tone music based on a particular row, the original form of the row, transposed or untransposed, as opposed to the inversion, retrograde, or retrograde inversion.

retrograde

Backward statement of a previously heard melody, passage, or twelve-tone row.

retrograde inversion

Upside-down and backward statement of a melody or twelve-tone row.

row

In twelve-tone music, an ordering of all twelve pitch-classes that is used to generate the
musical content.

series

(1) A row. (2) An ordering of specific durations, dynamic levels, or other non-pitch elements, used in serial music.

twelve-tone method

A form of atonal music based on the systematic ordering of the twelvenotes of the chromatic scale into a row that may be manipulated according to certain rules.

tetrachord

1) In Greek and medieval theory, a scale of four notes spanning a perfect fourth. (2) In modern theory, a set of four pitches or pitch-classes. (3)
In twelve-tone theory, the first four, middle four, or last four notes in the row.

Klangfarbenmelodie

Term coined by Arnold Schoenberg to describe a succession of tone colors that is perceived as analogous to the changing pitches in a melody.

primitivism

Musical style that represents the primitive or elemental through pulsation, static repetition, unprepared and unresolved dissonance, dry timbres, and other techniques.

ostinato

Short musical pattern that is repeated persistently
throughout a piece or section.

notional

Term for music since the early 1900s that establishes a single pitch as a tonal center, but does not follow the traditional rules of tonality.

serial music

Music composed in the twelve-tone method; used especially for music that extends the same general approach to series in parameters other than pitch.

cumulative form

Form used by Charles Ives and others in which the principal theme appears in its entirety only at the end of a work, preceded by its development.

experimental music

A trend in twentieth-century music that focused on the exploration of new musical sounds, techniques, and resources.

polytonality

The simultaneous use of two or more keys, each in a different layer of the music (such as melody and accompaniment).

collage

Work or passage that uses multiple quotations without following a standard procedure for doing so, such as quodlibet or medley.

quotation

Direct borrowing of one work in another, especially when the borrowed material is not reworked using a standard musical procedure (such as variations, paraphrase, or parody mass) but is set off as a foreign element.