Vocab

Question 1

One common way of beginning to describe musical sound with precision is to divide music into several parameters or … These normally include timbre, texture, melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, and form.

Answer 1

musical dimensions

Question 2

… refers to sound quality; roughly, it is the aspect of sound that allows us to tell a piano apart from a guitar, or one person’s voice apart from someone else’s.

Answer 2

timbre

Question 3

… refers to what types of sound make up a piece of music. A string quartet has one type of …… (two violins, a viola, and a cello), a rock band has another (normally vocals, guitars, bass guitar, and drums).

Answer 3

instrumentation

Question 4

… refers to how many layers are present in music and what the layers are doing. In a lot of music, this will refer to how many people are playing: one singer singing alone is one type of …, three singers singing a round (like “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat”) is another type of … However, the strict link to how many people are playing doesn’t always hold up; a single person playing piano can play one melodic line, or up to four (or more!) simultaneously, and in elctronic and recorded music, there can be many more layers than there are performers.

Answer 4

texture

Question 5

… music has only one melodic line, no matter how many people are producing it. A group of people singing “Happy Birthday” together is a good example

Answer 5

monophonic

Question 6

… or CHORALE-TEXTURE music features several voices singing in the same rhythm, but on different notes, as in much choral music

Answer 6

homorhythmic

Question 7

… music that has multiple independent lines at the same time; this is especially characteristic of music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras (e.g. Bach “Fugue in C Minor”)

Answer 7

polyphonic

Question 8

… music has a melody and an accompaniment; nearly all music we listen to in this course will be …, whether it’s an opera aria with orchestral accompaniment, a singer with a rock band, or a rapper with a sampled beat.

Answer 8

homophonic

Question 9

… refers to how musical sections are organized in time.

Answer 9

musical form

Question 10

… refers to how music is organized in time at levels shorter than sections.

Answer 10

rhythm

Question 11

This is the recurring, steady rate at which you would bob your head or tap your foot to a song.

Answer 11

beat

Question 12

A rate twice as fast, dividing each beat into two, though in principle you can divide the beat into three, four, five, or any number you want, or even more ways at once.

Answer 12

subdivisions

Question 13

Groups beats into twos or fours, (or other numbers). These gridlines are independent of what the music is actually doing.

Answer 13

metric

Question 14

Music without a beat.

Answer 14

ametric

Question 15

In music with a beat, we refer to the rate of beat (how fast or slow it is) as… Another way of specifying … is with beats per minute or bpm.

Answer 15

tempo

Question 16

The standard way of referring to how meter works in a piece of music is with a …, which specifies the number of beats that are grouped together.

Answer 16

time signature

Question 17

The most common time signature in popular music is… , which means …

Answer 17

4/4

four beats per measure

Question 18

… refers to how high or low a sound is. At a physical level, it’s a product of how fast or slow something is making the air vibrate. The lowest we can hear is around 20 vibrations per second, and the highest is around 20,000 vibrations per second.

Answer 18

pitch

Question 19

Western music uses something called …, which is a convention whereby music is basically built around twelve specific, standardized frequencies, any frequencies that are multiples of .5 or 2 of those frequencies. These twelve frequencies give us the notes on a piano, which we name with letters and the symbols for sharp (#) and flat (b)

Answer 19

equal temperament

Question 20

This distance between two pitches with the same letter name is called an …

Answer 20

octave

Question 21

The distance between one pitch and the pitch right next to it (so A to Bb, for example) is called… or …

Answer 21

semitone

or half step

Question 22

“Distance” between any two notes.

Answer 22

interval

Question 23

Intervals that blend nicely (like octaves) are called …

Answer 23

consonant

Question 24

Intervals that don’t blend nice together are called …

Answer 24

dissonant

Question 25

... refers to the main line in a piece of music. Normally, this is what the singer or highest instrument is doing, if there is one.

Answer 25

melody

Question 26

Melodies can be ... (notes moving mostly by step, as in "Ode to Joy") or ... (what guitar does starting at 0:14 of "Dancers to a Discordant System" by Meshuggah).

Answer 26

conjunct disjunct

Question 27

Melodies can have a ... (the chorus of "Africa" by Toto) or a ... (the chorus of "Take On Me" by A-ha).

Answer 27

small range large range

Question 28

It also makes sense to think of most melodies in terms of musical forces which are:

Answer 28

melodic gravity musical inertia stability melodic magnetism

Question 29

... is the tendency of a note (heard as "above the station") to descend. In "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," the first note provides a base for subsequent melodic action. Every other note is heard as above that. And if we pause on any of those other notes, we may feel that the unfinished melody is "up in the air." In other words, … pulls all those other notes down.

Answer 29

melodic gravity

Question 30

... is a comparative quality that we attribute to a note. We hear a note as unstable to the degree that it leads us to auralize another (more stable) pitch -- and a path that will take the melody to that pitch. In "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," the As ["lit-tle"] are less stable than the Gs that follow {'star"] because we experience the A as resolving to the G.

Answer 30

stability

Question 31

... is the tendency of an unstable note to move to the closest stable pitch, a tendency that grows stronger as we get closer to that goal.

Answer 31

melodic magnetism

Question 32

... refers to how different combinations of notes sound, and how these combinations are arranged in a piece of music.

Answer 32

harmony

Question 33

We call any combination of two or more notes a ...

Answer 33

chord

Question 34

C E G on the keyboard is a ...

Answer 34

major chord

Question 35

C Eb G is called a ...

Answer 35

minor chord

Question 36

Much Western music also follows a set of conventions that make it ... which means that there is a built in sense that one type of chord is "stable," and other chords are varying degrees of "unstable" in relation to it.

Answer 36

tonal

Question 37

O euchari style of music

Answer 37

Hildengard monophonic sacred

Question 38

Ave maria style of music

Answer 38

Josquin Desprez Renaissance homorhythmic consonant intervals polyphony

Question 39

Lagrime Mie style of music

Answer 39

Barbara Strozzi Baroque continuo

Question 40

Claudio Monteverdi style of music

Answer 40

Orfeo Baroque Opera continuo ritornelli

Question 41

repeating loop of chords

Answer 41

chord progression

Question 42

music effects:

Answer 42

``` reverb, echo/delay pitch effects distortion other ```

Question 43

The four singers in the opera are:

Answer 43

soprano alto tener bass

Question 44

In Baroque, a recurring, short instrumental passage that intervenes between other sections of music is called ...

Answer 44

ritornello

Question 45

In Baroque, the ... section is normally comprised of a cello and a harpsichord, and plays the same role of keeping time and fleshing out harmony, normally improvising within a tightly regulated framework.

Answer 45

continuo

Question 46

a secular genre for voice and continuo

Answer 46

cantanas

Question 47

... are a genre of (normally) keyboard music meant to set the stage for another piece of music. They were often improvised, and generally feature a repetitive figuration (rhythmic/textural) pattern that serves as a backdrop for harmonic exploration.

Answer 47

preludes

Question 48

... are a genre of strict, complex polyphonic keyboard music in which one voice begins alone with a main subject (a short, defining melody), and eventually two, three, four, or even five more voices enter one by ne with the same subject (starting on different pitches, and often with slight variations).

Answer 48

fugues

Question 49

Prelude C Major style of music

Answer 49

J.S. Bach Late Baroque

Question 50

This style of reciting, in the rhythm of the language, without all the repetitions of little phrases that would be true in a musical version, was called ...,

Answer 50

recitative style

Question 51

Elaborately ornamented vocal music featuring runs up and down the scale, trills, wide melodic leaps and many fast notes per syllable, used both to depict a character’s heightened emotional state and to display a singer’s ‘athletic’ virtuosity. Many people would describe this as ‘typical opera singing’. The term for this is called ...

Answer 51

coloratura

Question 52

Literally ‘little book’, the text sung in an opera or oratorio is called ...

Answer 52

libretto

Question 53

In opera, a solo instrumental part in a vocal number designed not just to accompany but to support the principal vocal part or to throw it into relief. Sometimes as flashy as the vocal part itself.

Answer 53

obbligato

Question 54

A style of vocal music that follows the rhythms and pitches of ordinary speech is called ...

Answer 54

recitative

Question 55

A Major Piano Sonata composed by ..., and the style of music is ...

Answer 55

Mozart classical music

Question 56

A Major Concerto is composed by ..., and the style of music is ...

Answer 56

Joseph de Bologne classical music

Question 57

Ninth symphony composed (while deaf) by ..., and the style of music is ...

Answer 57

Beethoven classical music

Question 58

..., a short melodic fragment associated with a specific character or idea that is often transformed to fit various dramatic situations.

Answer 58

leitmotif

Question 59

A use of pitches outside of the scale of the piece is called ...

Answer 59

chromaticism