Fine Arts Vocabulary

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• The material is copyrighted by USAD in 2024, and reproduction or transmission is prohibited.
• The Fine Arts section focuses on Environmental and Environmentalist Art and Music in the Natural World for the 2024–2025 academic year, under the theme of "OUR CHANGING CLIMATE."

Table of Contents

• The resource guide includes an introduction and several sections:
  • Introduction
  • Introduction to Music and Art History
  • Land Use and Land Rights
  • The Natural World
  • Pollution and Extraction
  • Celebrating the Planet
  • The Human Experience of Environment
  • Words of Warning
  • Conclusion, Notes, Art Bibliography, and Music Bibliography.

Introduction to Music

• Music is defined as "sound organized in time."
• It utilizes sounds, including noises and tones, to create music, particularly in the modern era.
• The creation of music often involves a composer, performers, and a means of recording and reproducing sounds.
• Human intention and perception are necessary for music to exist, sparking philosophical debates about the definition of music.

The Physics of Musical Sound

• Sound is a wave of energy with amplitude and frequency.
• Amplitude affects the loudness (decibel level), while frequency affects the pitch (highness or lowness).
• Human ear perceives frequencies between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second as a sustained tone.
• A pure sine wave at 440 Hz is typically tuned to "A-440."
• Musical sounds can be pitched or non-pitched, with percussion instruments providing most of the non-pitched sounds.

Instruments as Sound Sources

• Ethnomusicologists Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbostel categorized instruments into four groups:
  • Chordophones: Instruments with vibrating strings (e.g., violins, harps, guitars).
  • Aerophones: Instruments with vibrating columns of air (e.g., horns, flutes).
  • Membranophones: Instruments with vibrating membranes (e.g., drums).
  • Idiophones: Instruments whose bodies vibrate when struck (e.g., bells, woodblocks, xylophones).
  • Electrophones: Instruments that create sound waves using an oscillator and electricity.
• Western orchestral instruments are grouped into families: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.
• Keyboard instruments sometimes form a fifth category, that includes the piano, harpsichord, organ, and celesta.
• Electronic instruments, like the theremin, appeared in the early 20th century, regulating frequency and amplitude through electrical fields.
• Musique concrète involved recording and manipulating sounds on tape through techniques like looping and splicing.

Pitch, Rhythm, and Harmony

Pitch

• Pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound.
• Octave: The distance between a pitch and its next higher or lower repetition (e.g., A to the next A).

Pitch on a Keyboard

• High pitches are on the right, low pitches on the left.
• Half step (semitone): The distance between any two adjacent keys.
• Whole step: The distance between every other key.
• White keys are natural keys (A through G).
• Sharp (\,♯) raises a pitch by a half step.
• Flat \mathrm{\flat} lowers a pitch by a half step.

Intervals

• Interval: The distance between any two pitches.
• Half-step: The smallest interval in Western music.
• Intervals are named based on the alphabetical letter names of the two pitches.
• Intervals can be harmonic (simultaneous) or melodic (successive).

Minor Scales and Blues Inflections

• Minor scale variations: natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor.
• Minor scales feature a lowered third scale degree.
• Harmonic minor raises the seventh scale degree by a half step.
• Melodic minor raises the sixth and seventh scale degrees ascending, and restores them descending.
• Relative major and minor scales share the same pitches, while parallel scales share the same tonic pitch.
• Blues scales combine elements of major and minor scales, with variable 3rd and 7th degrees.

Melody

• Melody: A series of successive pitches forming a coherent whole.
• Melodies typically use seven notes of a single scale.
• A melody can be transposed to any major key by beginning on a different note.

Rhythm

• Rhythm: The way music is organized in time.
• Beat: The steady pulse underlying most music.
• Tempo: The speed of the beat.
  • Common tempo markings using Italian terms, such as Allegro (fast) and Adagio (slow).
  • Tempo can slow down (ritardando) or speed up (accelerando), gradually (poco a poco) or suddenly (subito).
• Unmetered music lacks a steady tempo, while rubato involves expressive variations in tempo.

Meter

• Beats are grouped into measures (bars) separated by bar lines.
• The first beat of a measure is typically the strongest (downbeat).
• Meter: The pattern of emphasis superimposed on groups of beats (duple, triple, quadruple, or irregular).

Rhythmic Notation

• Symbols indicate note duration (whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, etc.).
• A dot adds half the original value to a note.
• Notes of the same pitch can be tied together to extend their duration.
• Rests indicate silence and have corresponding symbols for different durations.

Harmony

• Harmony: Occurs when two or more tones sound simultaneously.

Chords

• Chord: Three or more pitches sounding simultaneously.

Keys

• Key: The world of pitch relationships within which a piece of music takes place.
• The gravitational center of a key is the tonic pitch.

Form in Music

• Form: Describes how music is organized on a larger time scale.

Elements of Form

Motive

• Motive: The smallest identifiable recurring musical idea with a distinctive melodic and rhythmic profile.
• Ostinato: A melodic or rhythmic motive repeated many times in immediate succession.

Phrase

• Phrase: A cohesive musical thought.

Theme

• Theme: A set of phrases that make a complete melody.

Introduction and Coda

• Introduction: Music that precedes the first main theme of the piece.
• Coda: A concluding section that wraps up the composition.

Common Forms

• Repetition, variation, and contrast are basic formal processes in music.

Repetition

• Repetition: Using identical pitches, rhythms, and harmonies.
• Sequence: Repeating musical material at a different pitch level.

Variation

• Variation: Repetition with alterations to create continuity and contrast.

Music Summary

• Music is sound organized in time.
• Common-practice tonality is a widely accepted system for describing pitch and harmony relationships.
• Pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound.
• Harmony occurs when two or more pitches sound simultaneously.
• The octave occurs naturally in the overtone series.
• Melody is a coherent succession of pitches perceived as a whole.
• Major and minor scales are sets of seven different pitches arranged in a specific pattern.
• The beat is the steady, regular pulse underlying most music.
• Tempo is the speed of the beat.
• Meter groups beats into regular patterns of strong and weak beats.
• Rhythm is the series of durations of varying lengths that overlie the beat.
• Music can be represented by diagrams, notation, or sound recordings.

Introduction to Art History

• Art history is an academic discipline dedicated to constructing the social, cultural, and economic contexts of artwork creation.
• Goals of art history include understanding art in its historical moment and considering formal qualities, function, artist intentions, audience perspectives, and related questions.
• Art history is related to anthropology, history, and sociology, and overlaps with aesthetics and art criticism.

History

• Art encompasses a broad range of visual material, including objects previously dismissed as "craft."

The Development of Art History

• Art history emerged as an academic discipline in the mid-18th century.
• Ancient Roman historian Pliny the Elder analyzed historical and contemporary art in his text "Natural History."
• Renaissance author Giorgio Vasari gathered biographies of great Italian artists in "The Lives of the Artists."
• Enlightenment philosopher Johann Joachim Winckelmann emphasized stylistic development related to historical context.
• Modern art history focuses on the interrelationship between formal qualities and context.
• Revisionist art history, particularly by feminist historians, addresses biases and expands the scope to include multicultural perspectives and visual culture.

Elements of Art

Formal Qualities of Art

• Formal qualities are the basic visual components of a work of art, including line, shape, form, space, color, and texture.

Line

• Line: The path of a point moving through space.
• Lines characterize length, width, and direction and can be hard, soft, bold, indistinct, uniform, or varying in width.
• Lines may be solid or consist of interrupted dots or imply edges of objects.
• Artists use lines to express ideas or feelings visually.
  • Horizontal and vertical lines create a stable and static feeling.
  • Vertical lines cause the eye to move upward.
  • Horizontal lines suggest peace and tranquility.
  • Curving and jagged lines create a sense of activity.

Shape and Form

• Shape: Defines the two-dimensional area of an object.
• Form: Three-dimensional objects with length, width, and depth.
• Geometric shapes/forms: Precise and regular, convey order and stability.
• Organic shapes/forms: Freeform and irregular, express movement and rhythm.

Space

• Space: An element of art related to the organization of objects and areas around them.
• Positive space: Objects, shapes, or forms in an artwork.
• Negative space: The area around objects, shapes, or forms. It can surround the forms or be created as a result of open spaces within the forms.
• Freestanding sculpture: Fully in the round.
• Relief sculpture: Projects from a surface, either high relief (boldly projecting) or bas-relief (slightly projecting).

Perspective

• Perspective: The creation of the illusion of depth in two-dimensional artworks.
• Techniques include:
  • Shading and highlighting to replicate light and space.
  • Placing objects lower on the picture plane to appear closer.
  • Manipulating object size to create a sense of perspective.
  • Overlapping closer objects over those farther away.
  • Giving closer objects greater detail.
  • Aerial/atmospheric perspective: Using lighter, more neutral colors and less contrast for distant objects.
• Linear perspective: Founded on converging lines at a vanishing point on the horizon.

Color

• Hue: The name of the color.
  • Primary colors: Red, blue, and yellow.
  • Secondary colors: Orange, green, violet.
  • Tertiary colors: Red-violet, violet-blue, blue-green, yellow-green, yellow-orange, red-orange.
• Color wheel: Organizes hues into a visual scheme.
• Value: Lightness or darkness of a color or gray.
• Intensity: Brightness or purity of a color.
• Color schemes can produce specific visual or emotional effects.
• Warm colors (red, orange, yellow) seem to advance, while cool colors (green, blue, violet) appear to recede.
• Color can be local (true color), arbitrary (chosen for emotional impact), or optical (affected by lighting).

Texture

• Texture: How things feel or appear to feel if touched.
• Actual texture: Used in art (e.g., ceramic art, collages).
• Visual texture: Illusion of texture in two-dimensional media.

Composition

• Composition: Artist's organization of elements of art.
• Rhythm: Movement or pattern through repetition of elements.
• Motif and pattern: Repetition of elements within a grid system.
• Balance: Equal distribution of visual weight.
  • Symmetrical balance: Exact repetition on both sides of a central axis.
  • Approximate symmetry: Slight variations on either side of the central axis.
  • Asymmetrical balance: Organization of unlike objects.
• Contrast: Creates interest; focal point directs the eye.
• Proportion: Size relationships among parts of a composition.
• Scale: Dimensional relation of parts and the work in its entirety.

Processes and Techniques

Drawing

• Drawing: Most basic art process.
• Common media: Pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, pastels, crayons, felt-tip pens.
• Surfaces: walls of rock or paper (smooth or rough, white or colored).
• Techniques: washes, color may be introduced.

Printmaking

• Printmaking: Mechanically aided two-dimensional processes for producing multiple original artworks.
• Processes: relief prints, intaglio prints, lithographs, screen prints.
• Screen prints: using a stencil to transfer images.

Painting

• Paint: Usually composed of pigments, binders, and solvents.
• Techniques: Variety of surfaces, brushes, fingers, sticks, palette knives.

Sculpture

• Sculpture: Carving, modeling, casting, and construction.
• Freestanding: Can be viewed from every angle.
• Relief: Attached to surfaces.
  • High-relief: Projects significantly.
  • Low-relief: Projects slightly.

Architecture

• Architecture: Art and science of designing and constructing buildings.
• Techniques:
  • Post-and-lintel construction: Horizontal beam across upright posts.
  • Arch, vault, and dome: Variations allowing for greater height and open space.
  • Flying buttresses: External arches in medieval cathedrals.

Art Summary

• Line is the most basic of art elements.
• Shape defines two-dimensional area, while forms are three-dimensional.
• Perspective creates the illusion of depth.
• Primary pigment colors are red, blue, and yellow.
• Black and white are neutrals, not hues.
• A motif is a single element of a pattern.
• Drawing is the most basic art process.
• Scale refers to dimensional relations and overall size.
• Printmaking permits mechanically aided reproduction.
• Paint consists of pigments, binders, and solvents.
• Sculpture methods include carving, modeling, casting, and construction.
• The Parthenon exemplifies post-and-lintel construction.

Land Use and Land Rights

• Land is the source for artistic production materials.
• Landscape painting became important in the modern era, depicting lands as subject matter.
• Landscape paintings of the American West were harnessed to Manifest Destiny.
• Contemporary art re-engages landscape traditions within political and environmental issues.
• The unseen aspects of land have become vital in art.
• Artworks now interrogate forces that divide lands from inhabitants.

U.S. Landscape and Manifest Destiny

• Manifest Destiny was the 19th-century belief that settlers were destined to possess the North American continent.
• Land traditions were dismissed, and indigenous peoples killed.

Key Terms Describing Indigenous People

• “Indigenous” is culturally-originating in a particular place.
• “Native American” describes cultures originating in North America.
• “First Nations” is commonly used in Canada and recognizes sovereignty.
• “Aboriginal” refers to the first inhabitants of a territory.
• “Indian” is a term with complicated legal standing with legal standing in the United States.
• Tribal people also refer to themselves by their tribe name.

Allora & Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints), 2002

• Allora & Calzadilla collaborate across media (sculpture, performance, photography, video, sound art).
• Land Mark (Foot Prints) relates to land use on Vieques, Puerto Rico, disrupted by U.S. military occupation.
• The work protested the US military firing range with custom-made shoes with symbols of Vieques, weapons of war, and pleas for freedom. The artists' photographs are recreations after the original marks were blown away.
• The title plays on the term "landmark;" it sought the more permanent US military occupation of Vieques with impermanent markings on the land.
  The U.S. military began to close the site in 2001 and left entirely in 2003.