Music History II Unit 4 Terms

New Objectivity

Term coined in the 1920s to describe a kind of new realism in music, in reaction to the emotional intensity of the late ROMANTICS and the EXPRESSIONISM of Schoenberg and Berg.

Gebrauchsmusik

Term from the 1920s to describe music that was socially relevant and useful, especially music for amateurs, children, or workers to play or sing.

Neo-Romanticism

A trend of the late twentieth century in which composers adopted the familiar tonal idiom of nineteenth-century ROMANTIC music and incorporated its sounds and gestures.

socialist realism

A doctrine of the Soviet Union, begun in the 1930s, in which all the arts were required to use a realistic approach (as opposed to an abstract or symbolic one) that portrayed socialism in a positive light. In music this meant use of simple, accessible language, centered on MELODY, and patriotic subject matter.

primitivism

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

sound mass

Term coined by Edgard Varèse for a body of sounds characterized by a particular TIMBRE, register, RHYTHM, or MELODIC gesture, which may remain stable or may be transformed as it recurs.

spatial

Pertaining to a conception of music as sounds moving through musical space, rather than as the presentation and VARIATION of THEMES or MOTIVES.

electronic music

Music based on sounds that are produced or modified through electronic means.

tone clusters

Term coined by Henry Cowell for a CHORD of DIATONIC or CHROMATIC seconds.

fuging tone

Eighteenth-century American type of PSALM or HYMN tune that features a passage in free IMITATION, usually preceded and followed by HOMOPHONIC sections.

free jazz

An experimental JAZZ style introduced in the 1960s by Ornette Coleman, using IMPROVISATION that disregards the standard forms and conventions of jazz.

modal

Making use of a MODE.

prepared piano

An invention of John Cage in which various objects—such as pennies, bolts, screws, or pieces of wood, rubber, plastic, or slit bamboo—are inserted between the strings of a PIANO, resulting in complex percussive sounds when the piano is played from the keyboard.

chance

Approach to composing music pioneered by John Cage, in which some of the decisions
normally made by the composer are instead determined through random procedures, such
as tossing coins. Chance differs from INDETERMINACY but shares with it the result that the sounds in the music do not convey an intention and are therefore to be experienced only as pure sound.

indeterminacy

An approach to composition, pioneered by John Cage, in which the composer leaves certain aspects of the music unspecified, as distinct from CHANCE.

tone serialism

The application of the principles of the TWELVE-TONE METHOD to musical parameters other than pitch, including duration, intensities, and TIMBRES.

just intonation

A system of tuning NOTES in the SCALE, common in the RENAISSANCE, in which most (but not all) thirds, sixths, perfect fourths, and perfect fifths are in perfect tune.

musique concrète

Term coined by composers working in Paris in the 1940s for music composed by assembling and manipulating recorded sounds, working "concretely" with sound itself rather than with music NOTATION.

spectralism

Late twentieth-century compositional movement emphasizing TIMBRE (often
electronically produced) over pitch as a large-scale structural feature.

digital

Relating to methods for producing or recording musical sounds by translating them into a coded series of on-off pulses, in the same way that computers store and transmit data.

sampling

A process of creating new COMPOSITIONS by patching together snippets of previously recorded music.

minimalism

One of the leading musical styles of the late twentieth century, in which materials are reduced to a minimum and procedures simplified so that the musical content is
immediately apparent. Often characterized by a constant pulse and many repetitions of
simple RHYTHMIC, MELODIC, or HARMONIC patterns.

rock n’ roll/rock

A musical style that emerged in the United States in the mid-1950s as a blend of black and white traditions of POPULAR MUSIC, primarily rhythm-and-blues, country music, pop music, and TIN PAN ALLEY.

postmodernism

Trend in the late twentieth century that blurs the boundaries between high and popular art, and in which styles of all epochs and cultures are equally available for creating music.

polystylism

Term for a combination of newer and older musical styles created through QUOTATION or stylistic allusion.