Final Exam Flashcards
Impressionism
Late-nineteenth-century term derived from art, used for music that evokes moods and visual images through colorful harmony and instrumental timbre.
Whole-tone scale
A scale consisting of only whole steps
Octatonic scale
A scale that alternates whole and half steps
Pentatonic scale
Five adjacent notes on the circle of fifths, the black keys on the piano.
Modality
Twentieth-century composers broke away from the musical language of the predecessors and contemporaries while maintaining strong links to tradition.
Modernism
Twentieth-century composers broke away from the musical language of the predecessors and contemporaries while maintaining strong links to tradition.
Atonality
Terms for music that avoids establishing a central pitch or tonal center (such as the tonic in tonal music)
Expressionism
Early-twentieth-century term derived from art, in which music avoids all traditional forms of “beauty” in order to express deep personal feelings through exaggerated gestures, angular melodies and extreme dissonance
Sprechstimme
A vocal style developed by Arnold Schoenberg in which the performer approximates the written pitches in the gliding tones of speech, while following the notated rhythm.
Twelve-tone method
A form of atonal music based on the systematic ordering of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale into a row that may be manipulated according to certain rules.
Tetrochord
In twelve-tone theory, the first four, middle four, or last four notes in the row.
Row/series
In twelve-tone music, an ordering of all twelve pitch-classes that is used to generate the musical content.
Retrograde
backward statement of a previously heard melody, passage, or twelve-tone row.
Retrograde inversion
Upside-down and backward statement of a melody or twelve-tone row.
Avant-garde
Term for music (and art) that is iconoclastic, irreverent, antagonistic, and nihilistic, seeking to overthrow established aesthetics.
Futurism
Twentieth-century movement that created music based on noise.
Primitivism
Musical style that represents the primitive or elemental through pulsation, static repetition, unprepared and unresolved dissonance, dry timbres, and other techniques
Neoclassicism
Trend in music from the 1910s to the 1950s in which composers revived, imitated, or evoked the styles, genres and forms of pre-romantic music, especially those of the eighteenth century.
New Objectivity
Term coined in the 1920s to describe a kind of new realism in music, in reaction to the emotional intensity of the late romantics and the expressionism of Schoenberg and Berg.
Gebrauchtsmusik
Term from the 1920s to describe music that was socially relevant and useful, especially music for amateurs, children or workers to play or sing.
Socialist Realism
A doctrine of the Soviet Union, begun in the 1930s, in which all the arts were required to use a realistic approach (as opposed to an abstract or symbolic one) that portrayed socialism in a positive light. In music this meant use of simple, accessible language, centered on melody and patriotic subject matter.
Socialist Realism
A doctrine of the Soviet Union, begun in the 1930s, in which all the arts were required to use a realistic approach (as opposed to an abstract or symbolic one) that portrayed socialism in a positive light. In music this meant use of simple, accessible language, centered on melody and patriotic subject matter.
Fuging tune
Eighteenth-century American type of psalm or hymn tune that features a passage in free imitation, usually preceded and followed by homophonic sections.
Tine Pan Alley
(1) Jocular name for a district in New York where numerous publishers specializing in popular songs were located from the 1880s through the 1950s. (2) Styles of American popular song from that era.
Call and response
Alternation of short phrases between a leader and a group; used especially for music in the African-American tradition.
Spirituals
African American type of religious song that originated among southern slaves and was passed down through oral tradition, with texts often based on stories or images from the Bible.
12-bar blues
Standard formula for the blues, with a harmonic progression in which the first four-measure phrase is on the tonic, the second phrase begins on the subdominant and ends on the tonic and the third phrase starts on the dominant and returns on the tonic.
Contrafact
In jazz, a new melody composed over a harmonic progression borrowed from another song.
Prepared piano
An invention of John Cage in which various objects – such as pennies, bolts, screws, or pieces of wood, rubber, plastic, or slit bamboo – are inserted between the strings of a piano, resulting in complex percussive sounds when the piano is played from the keyboard.
Chance music
An approach to composing music pioneered by John Cage, in which some of the decisions normally made by the composer are instead determined through random procedures, such as tossing coins.
Indeterminacy
An approach to composition, pioneered by John Cage, in which the composer leaves certain aspects of the music unspecified, as distinct from chance.
Minimalism
One of the leading musical styles of the late twentieth century, in which materials are reduced to a minimum and procedures simplified so that the musical content is immediately apparent, Often characterized by a constant pulse and many repetitions of simple rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic patterns.
Micropolyphony
the use of many independent lines that cannot be heard independently but contribute to a larger sound process. (Ligeti)
Pandiatonicism
use of all tones of a key at any given time, without regard to chords; emphasizes counterpoint over harmony
