Assessment 4 Terms Flashcards
Atonality
The absence of a tonal center altogether
Pantonality
Schoenberg’s term for atonality. Believed that music will always be tonal in the sense that there must be some kind of relationship from one tone to the next.
Expressionism
A broad artistic movement of the time that sought to give voice to the unconscious, to make manifest humanity’s deepest and darkest emotions.
Sprechstimme
Is neither speech nor song, but a means of declamation somewhere between the two. Indicated by means of standard notes with a small ‘x’ through the stem. The effect: as song it falls short of lyricism; as speech it constitutes purposefully exaggerated, overblown kind of delivery.
First used in cabaret.
First Viennese School
A name mostly used to refer to three composers of the Classical period in Western art music in late-18th-century Vienna: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Second Viennese School
The group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his close associates in early 20th century Vienna. Characterized by late-Romantic expanded tonality and later a totally chromatic expressionism without firm tonal centre (often referred to as atonality) and later still, Schoenberg’s serial twelve-tone technique.
Set theory
provides concepts for categorizing musical objects and describing their relationships.
Tonality
A musical system in which pitches or chords are arranged so as to induce a hierarchy of perceived stabilities and attractions. The pitch or chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic. Tonality was the predominant musical system in the European tradition of classical music from the late 1500s until early in the 20th century.
Extreme Chromaticism
the use of notes foreign to the mode or diatonic scale upon which a composition is based.
Serialism
a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements.
Pierrot Ensemble
a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, frequently augmented by the addition of a singer or percussionist, and/or by the performers doubling on other woodwind/stringed/keyboard instruments.
Commedia Dell’arte
A style of performance in which the performers are constantly calling attention to the fact that they are performers.
Developing Variation (formerly fortspinning)
Coined by Schoenberg. Manipulating motivic ideas. Process by which an idea grows and evolves over the course of a movement or entire work.
Organicism
seen as a living form, an organism, and many analysists perceived the challenge to be that of identifying what might be called the DNA of the work at hand.
Neoclassicism
The deliberate imitation of an earlier style within a contemporary context. The idea of writing in a deliberately old-fashioned style or in a manner openly influenced by a much early style.
