African Drumming - Key words Flashcards
A Capella
Singing without musical accompaniment
Accelerando
Gradual increase in speed
Accent
The emphasis or stress placed on a particular note
Balafon
A gourd-resonated xylophone
Call and response
A compositional technique, often a succession of two distinct phrases that works like a conversation in music
Cross rhythms
Two conflicting rhythms heard together
Cyclic rhythms
any compositional form characterized by the repetition, in a later movement or part of the piece, of motives, themes, or whole sections from an earlier movement in order to unify structure.
Decelerando
Gradual decrease in speed
Djembe drum
A rope-tuned skin-covered goblet drum played with bare hands, originally from West Africa.
Dundun
A family of cylindrical African drums.
Dynamics
The variation of loudness in music, how loud or soft.
Falsetto
A male voice which is artificially high
Gourd
A record label featuring acoustic instrumental music with various ensembles of guitar, cello, flute, oboe, harp, fiddle, hammered and mountain dulcimer, banjo and mandolin.
African flute
Improvisation
The activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, often to make a particular performer stand out.
Kora
An instrument that combines features of the harp and lute
Maracas
A hand percussion instrument usually played in pairs and common in Caribbean, Latin American, and South American music
Master drummer
The person who leads other drummers in playing drum rhythms
Mbira
Uniquely African percussion instrument
Oral tradition
The process masters of the music used to efficiently pass musical wisdom down to succeeding generations of musicians
Ostinato
A repeated pattern
Polyrhythm
A combination of two or more rhythms played simultaneously while moving at the same linear tempo
Polyphonic
They can play multiple independent melody lines simultaneously
Repetition
The repeating of certain parts of a song
Syncopation
An off-beat rhythm
Talking drum
An hourglass-shaped pressure drum so-named because it can imitate spoken language’s intonations and rhythms
Tempo
The rate of speed
Unison
Occurs when two or more people play or sing the same pitch or in octaves
Vocal register
A series of consecutive tones with similar properties
