MUSI2737 - Key Terms Prelude 6 + 7

Odom || Tuesday + Thursday 2:00pm

Impressionism

A French movement developed by visual artists who favored vague, hazy images intended to capture an “impression” of the subject in different lights. Impressionism in music is characterized by exotic scales, unresolved dissonances, parallel chords, rich orchestral tone color, and free rhythm

Ninth Chord

Five‐note chord spanning a ninth between its lowest and highest pitches

Futurism

An early twentieth‐century anti‐establishment artistic movement that emphasized the machine age and the dynamism of the era

Cubism

Early twentieth‐century art movement begun in Paris, characterized by the fragmentation of forms into abstract or geometric patterns

Expressionism

A style of visual art and literature in Germany and Austria in the early twentieth century. The term is sometimes also applied to music, especially composers of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern)

Avant-Garde

French term that refers to new styles and techniques in the arts, especially in the early twentieth-century

Vaudeville

A light comedic variety show with music featuring popular song, dance, comedy, and acrobatics; flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Tin Pan Alley

Nickname for the popular music industry centered in New York City from the nineteenth century through the 1950s. Also, the style of popular song in the United States during that period

Changing Meter

Shifting between meters, sometimes frequently, within a single composition or movement; also shifting meter

Polyrhythm

The simultaneous use of several rhythmic patters or meters, common in twentieth‐century music and certain African musics

Polyharmony

Two or more streams of harmony played against each other, common in twentieth‐century music

Atonality

Total abandonment of tonality (which is centered in a key). Atonal music moves from one level of dissonance to another, without areas of relaxation

Serialism

Method of composition in which various musical elements (pitch, rhythm, dynamics, timbre) may be ordered in a fixed series

Sprechstimme

A vocal style in which the melody is spoken at approximate pitches rather than sung on exact pitches; developed by Schoenberg

Klangfarbenmelodie

Twentieth‐century technique in which the notes of a melody are distributed among different instruments, often in different registers, giving a pointillistic effect

Rondeau

Medieval and Renaissance fixed poetic form and French chanson type with a courtly love text

Twelve-Tone Music

Compositional procedure of the twentieth century based on an ordering of all twelve chromatic pitches (in a tone row), without a central pitch, or tonic, according to prescribed rules

Tone Row

An arrangement of the twelve chromatic pitches that serves as the basis of a twelve‐tone piece

Transposed Row

A tone row, or sequence of pitches, in twelve‐tone music that is shifted to another pitch level

Inversion

Mirror or upside‐down image of a melody or pattern, found in fugues and twelve‐tone compositions

Retrograde

Backward statement of a melody

Retrograde Inversion

Mirror image of the backward statement of a melody

Second Viennese School

Early twentieth‐century group of composers, including Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg, who developed and wrote in the style known as twelve‐tone music

Neo-Classicism

A twentieth‐century style that combined elements of Classical and Baroque music with modernist trends

Ethnomusicology

Comparative study of musics of the world, with a focus on the cultural context of music

Postmodernism

A movement in the arts and literature that reacts against early modernist principles through the use of classical and traditional elements

Minimalism

Contemporary musical style featuring the repetition of short melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns with little variation

Chance Music

Music that makes a deliberate use of indeterminacy, or chance, in its performance

Musique Concrète

Music made up of natural sounds and sound effects that are recorded and then manipulated electronically

Elektronische Musik

Electronic music developed in Germany in the 1930s that uses an oscillator to generate and alter waveforms

Tone Cluster

Highly dissonant combination of adjacent pitches sounded simultaneously

Microtone

Musical interval smaller than a semitone (half step), prevalent in some non‐Western musics and some twentieth‐century music

Prepared Piano

Piano whose sound is altered by the insertion of various materials (metal, rubber, leather, and paper) between the strings; invented by John Cage

Flutter Tonguing

Wind instrument technique in which the player’s tongue is fluttered as though “rolling an R” while he or she blows into the instrument

Musical

Genre of twentieth‐century musical theater, especially popular in the United States and Great Britain; features spoken dialogue and a dramatic plot interspersed with songs, ensemble numbers, and dancing

Process Music

A compositional style in which a composer selects a simple musical idea and repeats it over and over, as it’s gradually changed or elaborated upon

Phase Music

A technique in which musical phrases, recorded or performed live, are first synchronized and then slowly shifted rhythmically in multiple parts so that they create an overlapping “out of phase” effect; associated particularly with composer Steve Reich

Rock and Roll

Popular music style first heard in the 1950s, derived from African American rhythm and blues, country western, and pop music

Rock

A style of popular music with roots in rock and roll but differing in lyric content, recording technique, song length and form, and range of sounds. The term was first used in the 1960s to distinguish groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones from earlier artists.

Rhythm and Blues

Popular African American music style of the 1940s through the 60s, featuring a solo singer accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble (piano, guitar, double bass, drums, tenor saxophone), driving rhythms, and blues and pop song forms

Backbeat

In rock‐and‐roll and related genres, the second and fourth beats of the measure

Rockabilly

An early style of rock‐and‐roll, from the 1950s, that combines elements of country‐western music (“hillbilly”) with rhythm and blues; features twelve‐bar blues progressions and a driving beat

Riff

In jazz and rock, a short motive repeated over changing harmonies

Cover

Recording that remakes and reinterprets an earlier, often successful song with the goal of reaching a wider audience

Neo-Romanticism

A contemporary style of music that employs the rich harmonic language and other elements of Romantic and post‐Romantic composers

Underscoring

A technique used in films in which the music comes from an unseen source

Source Music

A film technique in which music comes from a logical source within the film and functions as part of the story

Leitmotif

“Leading motive,” or basic recurring theme, representing a person, object, or idea; widely used in Wagner’s music dramas

Erhu

Bowed, two‐string instrument from China, with its bow hairs fixed between the strings, and played resting on the leg

Spiritual Minimalism

Contemporary musical style related to minimalism, characterized by a weak pulse and long chains of lush progressions—either tonal or modal

Drone

Sustained sounding of one or several pitches for harmonic support, a common feature of some folk musics