Assessment 3 Terms Flashcards
Opera Buffa
- Comic Opera
- Content was humorous rather than serious
- Libretto centered on everyday characters rather than heroes, rulers, and gods.
- Singers included basses but not castrati.
- More emphasis on ensemble singing
- Avoided da capo arias
- Melodies straightforward and simple
What is intermezzo?
A work intended for performance between the acts of a larger (serious) opera.
Why was opera buffa controversal?
Opponents considered it an affront to established traditions.
What is the War of the Buffoons (Guerre des Bouffons) ?
- Ignited by debut of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona in Paris in 1752.
- Provided an opportunity for competing social groups to jockey for influence and a pretext for some to question authority without directly confronting it.
- French traditionalists wanted to uphold tragédie lyrique
- Others wanted to use opera buffa to promote a new, lighter style of musical theater in France.
What is the Quarrel of the Gluckists and Piccinnists?
- In the late 1770s the debate that pitted Italian against French culture.
- Featured Gluck and Piccinni who were both foreigners.
- Saw Gluck as continuing French ‘tragédie lyrique’ while Piccinni was preceived to represent Italian tradition of opera seria.
Stock Characters
- Stereotypical person whom audiences readily recognize from frequent recurrences.
- Easy targets for parody and to be criticized as clichés.
Galant Style
- Light and elegant free homophonic style of musical composition in the 18th century with rococo ornamentation.
What are some characteristics that distinguish reform opera from opera seria?
- no da capo arias
- little or no opportunity for vocal improvisation or virtuosic displays of vocal agility or power
- no long melismas
- a more predominantly syllabic setting of the text to make the words more intelligible
- far less repetition of text within an aria
- a blurring of the distinction between recitative and aria, declamatory and lyrical passages, with altogether less recitiative
- simpler, more flowing melodic lines
- an overture that is linked by theme or mood to the ensuing action
- more prominence for the chorus, giving it more important role commenting on the events unfolding on stage
Dramma Giocoso
Technique of a grand buffo scene as a dramatic climax at the end of an act. (Example of Mozart’s Don Giovanni)
What is a march?
A military form in duple meter characterized by a strong, repetitive beat for keeping soldiers in orderly formation.
What is a scherzo?
(Italian for “joke”)
Dance inspired movements, faster and longer than minuets;
What is a fugato?
A passage that begins like a fugue but does not sustain itself after a series of initial entries.
Describe concert overtures.
Emerged as a work of instrumental music in a single movement connected in some way with a known plot.
A single movement work that is associated with a drama, poem, place, event, or mood.
Cyclical Coherence
Multiple sections or movements, in which a theme, melody, or thematic material occurs in more than one movement as a unifying device (Examples: Beethoven’s 5th and 9th symphonies)
Realism
- Aka Verismo which was the Italian word for “reality”.
- Popular in Italian opera around the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. (Example: Puccini)
Idée Fixe
“fixed idea”
A recurring theme or character trait that serves as the structural foundation of a work
What does cavatina mean in Italian opera?
Designates any introductory aria sung by a main character.
What does cavatina mean in Germany?
Simple arias of an introspective quality, free of virtuosic display.
When did the genre of song for solo voice and piano emerge?
The first half of the 19th century.
What is a reason for song for solo voice and piano being so popular during this time?
The music was less demanding.
What is another name for the genre of song for solo voice and piano?
Lied (german)
What were some factors that led to Lied to its prominence?
- The rise of German poetry
- The growing availability of the pian
- The idealization of domesticity and the family
What are the three categories of form that songs fall into?
- strophic
- modified strophic
- through composed
Describe strophic form.
- the simplest of the three forms
- each verse (strophe) of a poem is set to the same music
Describe modified strophic form.
- music varies from strophe to strophe–
- melodic embellishment/alteration of texture or harmony but remains the same otherwise.
- like variation on a theme
Describe through-composed
- no recognizable pattern of repetition and often no repetition at all.
What is the character piece?
- A new genre associated almost exclusively with the piano.
- Instrumental counterpart to the song.
- Seeks to portray and explore the mood or character of a particular person, idea, situation, or emotion.
- Brief, sectional, fairly simple.
- Many follow ABA, AAB, or ABB pattern.
- Operates on the border between programmatic and absolute music.
What is a minstrel song?
- Made to represent African American slave life.
- Typically performed by white performers in blackface.
- Ensemble included: tambourine, castanets “bones”, banjo, and fiddle.
What are parlor songs?
- Named because performed in parlor setting.
- Texts are strophic and sentimental
- Simplicity and melodic straightforwardness similar to German lied
- Emphais on naturalness and directness.
Beklemmt
Heavy at the heart, oppressed. A word which Beethoven has attached to the middle section of the Cavatina in his Quartet in B flat (violin melody)
Anthropomorphization
Personification
Epilogue (postlude)
Final part of piece
Programmatic Music
Uses the tonal colors of musical instruments to imitate the sounds of nature from wind, rain, and thunder, as well as the sound of animals and mankind including tools and machinery.
Absolute Music
Music is free of extra-musical implications. Its comprehension depends solely on its musical structures, not on any narrative, pictorial, or other nonmusical ideas. Absolute music typically is identified not by a descriptive title but by the name of a musical form.
Narrative Music
Music that tells a story
Affect
the aesthetics of painting, music, and theatre, widely used in the Baroque era
Soggetto Cavato
This technique relies on the use of syllables from solmization
Techniqiue by Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez
Piano Cycle
individually complete songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a unit
What is a symphonic poem?
- Another name for concert overture.
- Programmatic
- Only one movement
- Written for the concert hall
Who coined the term for symphonic poem?
Liszt
What does impressionism represent?
- One of the earliest attempts to explore fundamentally new approaches to music.
- First used to describe painters (Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas.
How is musical impressionism form characterized?
- Form: avoids goal oriented structures. Flow from one movement to the next, building and receding in tension but without the sense of striving towards resolution. Structured less around harmony and thematic ideas than around masses of sound.
How is musical impressionism harmony characterized?
- Use of 9th, 11th, and 13th chords
- Draw occasionally on nondiatonic scales creating the sound of East Asia
What was voice leading like in impressionism?
- Individual voices move more or less independently of one another.
- Parallel 4ths, 5th, and octaves
What is the rhythm of impressionism characterized by?
- Fluid
- Avoid any definited sense of meter
- Elusive sense of motion that at times moves forward and at times seems to hang in suspension
What are some characteristics of the timbre of impressionist music?
- New sounds drawn out by piano and orchestra
What was the approach of symbolism
- In place of narrative a succesion of images.
- In place of description, symbols, allusions, suggestions.
What is the octatonic scale?
- Alternates between half and whole steps
- Contains all possible intervals from minor 2nd to Major 7th
- Coloristic effect in 19th century music
- Symmetrical construction and strict alternation between half and whole steps
What is a mystic chord?
Augmented and diminished fourths.
What are quartal harmonies?
Chords built on the interval of a fourth rather than a third.
What is primitivism?
Aka radical primitivism; Considered a positive, purifying force in all the arts.
- Rejection of the self-imposed, arbitrary conventions of Western culture.
- Source of beauty and strength
- Represented a stage of civilization unthreatened by decadence and self-consciousness.
How was primitivism applied in music?
- Elevated rhythm
- Abandoned or altered concepts such as voice leading, triadic harmony, and the major and minor forms of the diatonic scale.
Whole Tone Scale
- Scale in which each note is separated from its neighbors by the interval of a whole step.
- Extended use in impressionist music
Pentatonic Scale
- a musical scale or mode with five notes per octave
Polytonal Harmony
- the musical use of more than one key simultaneously.
New Timbres in late 19th and early 20th century music
- Find new sound through new instruments or a different way of playing old instruments.
Klezmer/Klezmorim
Music produced by professional Jewish musicians of eastern Europe
Modernism
- a philosophical and aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in music around the turn of the 20th century
- a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that lead to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews
How did Beethoven influence Brahms and Mahler symphonies?
- Funeral march in Mahler 1 movement 3
- Variations in Brahms symphony 4 like last movement of Beethoven 3. Also, in his 1st symphony last movement there are parallels to Beethoven 9.
Changes to symphony and orchestra in late 19c?
- Growing size of orchestra
- Increased number of civic orchestras and standing concert series
- Public nature of the genre
High and Low Art
High Art is seen by the “experts” as a timeless piece that deserves recognition and respect within the art community.
Low Art is often characterized by having a specific place in our history something that is a sign of the times rather than something that has withstood the test of time.
Beethoven’s Early Period
- Took works of Mozart and Haydn (etc) as his model
- Still created his own style
Beethoven’s Middle Period
- Often called ‘heroic’ because of its evocation of struggle and triumph (Examples: 3rd symphony, 5th symphony, and 3rd Leonore Overture)
Beethoven’s Late Period
- Became increasingly withdrawn from society
- Music became more introspective
- Abandoned herioic style in general for one that is more enigmatic.
- Works characterized by an exploration of musical extremes in: form, proportion, texture, and harmony.
- Finale of Beethoven 9 sets precedent of choral music in instrumental genre
- Explores extreme lengths
- Extremes in texture
