Music History: The Romantic Piano to Modernism and Jazz

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the transition from Romantic Period piano miniatures and Bel Canto opera to Modernism and early American Jazz and Blues traditions.

Innigkeit

A German term for poetic interiority or a private, intimate mode of expression, often associated with Romantic piano works by composers like Felix Mendelssohn.

Character Piece

A new genre of the Romantic era consisting of a miniature work for solo piano that seeks to explore the mood or character of a particular person, idea, or emotion.

Absolute Music

Music that is intended to be 'just music' without a specific narrative or composer intention to convey a concrete image, such as Beethoven's Symphony No. $5$.

Program Music

Music designed to express a concrete image, story, or narrative given by the composer in each movement.

Nocturne

A specific type of character piece that is a short, lyrical work for solo piano, generally in a slower tempo and dreamy in character.

Tempo rubato

A technique characterized by slurred notes and flexible timing that makes a piece sound improvised, frequently used in the works of Frederic Chopin.

Double stops

An innovation in violin technique championed by Niccolo Paganini involving the playing of two strings simultaneously.

Bel Canto

An Italian operatic school of the $19^{th}$ century that translates to 'beautiful singing' and emphasizes the beauty and virtuosity of the human voice.

Cabaletta

The final portion of an operatic scene characterized by an extreme show of vocal virtuosity from the hero or heroine.

Modernism

An artistic movement beginning around the $1870s$ characterized by a conscious rejection of traditional ideals and a decision to move away from established aesthetic rules.

Impressionism

A musical style, often associated with Claude Debussy, that captures modernity and life as it is felt through floating, directionless chords and non-diatonic scales.

Polytonality

A modernist harmonic technique, notably used by Igor Stravinsky, involving two different chords or keys stacked on top of one another to create a discordant tonic.

Expressionism

A musical and artistic style focused on how something feels emotionally rather than seeking realistic representation.

Sprechstimme

A German vocal style developed by Arnold Schoenberg that serves as a cross between singing and speaking, often sounding sinister or mysterious.

12-tone serialism

A compositional technique where all $12$ chromatic notes are arranged in a 'tone row' and treated equally; a note cannot be repeated until the entire row has been heard.

Retrograde

A method of manipulating a tone row in serialism by playing the sequence of notes backwards.

Syncopation

A rhythmic device essential to Ragtime and Jazz that involves emphasizing beats that fall between the main beats or off the downbeat.

Blue notes

Notes taken from the standard European scale—typically the $3^{rd}$, $5^{th}$, or $7^{th}$—that are flatted to create the distinct sound of the Blues.

12-bar blues

A standard chord progression consisting of $12$ measures that repeats, providing a structural foundation for improvisation in Blues and Jazz.

Exoticism

A trend where Western music attempts to imitate the sounds, scales, or musical textures of other cultures, such as Debussy’s use of the Indonesian Gamelan influence.