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.
Nostalgia for the distant musical past
in the wake of WWI, took pleasure in the vaguely nostalgic sense of neoclassicism.
New objectivity “Neue Sachlichkeit”
rejected the sentimentality of late Romanticism and the emotional agitation of expressionism.
“Emancipation of the dissonance”
to eradicate any distinction between consonance and dissonance
Older forms revived in early 20c: Rondo, Variation, Sonata Form, Musette, Canon, Ritornello Principle
Revived through neoclassicism
Serial Composition (AKA serialism, dedecaphony, 12 tone technique)
Schoenberg developed in the early 1920s. Based on the premise than an established unit of music (often rows or series) of 12 different pitches can be varied repeatedly to provide the structural basis for an entire work. Provides the means to construct large scale forms that were structurally coherent despite the absence of a tonal center.
Row (AKA series)
Non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets are sometimes found.
Forms of the row: Prime (p)-Inversion (I)-Retrograde (R)-Retrograde Inversion (RI)
Prime-basic for of the row
Inversion: row played upside down (rise becomes fall)
Retrograde: row played backward beginning with last note and ending with the first.
Retrograde Inversion: inverted form. Inverted form played backward.
Music Drama
an opera whose structure is governed by considerations of dramatic effectiveness, rather than by the convention of having a series of formal arias.
Gesamtkunstwerk
translated as total work of art, ideal work of art, universal artwork, synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, all-embracing art form or total artwork) is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so.
Leitmotiv (similar concepts: reminiscence motive, idée fixe)
a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation.
Stabreim “staff rhyme”
a form of poetic meter based on alliteration, the repetition of initial consonants at key points within the poetic line.
Alliteration
the repetition of initial consonants at key points within the poetic line.
Endless Melody
in which the drama and music constantly flowed throughout the entire opera
