Final Terms Flashcards
Improvisation
Spontaneous invention of music while performing, including devising variations, embellishments, or accompaniments for existing music.
Vielle
The vielle is a European bowed stringed instrument used in the medieval period, similar to a modern violin but with a somewhat longer and deeper body, three to five gut strings, and a leaf-shaped pegbox with frontal tuning pegs, sometimes with a figure-8 shaped body.
Pavane and Galliard
A pavane is a sixteenth-century dance in slow duple meter with three repeated sections (AABBCC). Often followed by a galliard, which is another sixteenth-century dance in fast triple meter, in the same form (AABBCC)
Vihuela
The vihuela is a 15th-century fretted plucked Spanish string instrument, shaped like a guitar but tuned like a lute. It was used in 15th- and 16th-century Spain as the equivalent of the lute in Italy and has a large resultant repertory. There were usually five or six doubled strings.
Tablature / Intabulation
Arrangement of a vocal piece for a lute or keyboard, typically written tablature, which is a system of notation used for lute or other plucked string instruments that tells the player which string to pluck and where to place the fingers on the strings rather than indicating which notes will results. Tablatures were also used for keyboard instruments until the seventeenth century.
Variations (diferencias in Spanish)
Form that presents an uninterrupted series of variants (each called a variation) on a theme; the theme may be a melody, a bass line, a harmonic plan, or other musical subject.
Harpsichord
Keyboard instrument in use between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. It was distinguished from the clavichord and the piano by the fact its strings were plucked, not struck.
Viola da Gamba or Viol
Bowed, fretted string instrument popular from the mid-fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries, held between the legs.
Lute and Theorbo
Plucked string instrument popular from the late Middle Ages through the Barque period, typically pear- or almond-shaped with a rounded back, flat fingerboard, frets, and one single and five double strings.
Sackbut
Renaissance brass instrument, an early form of the trombone.
Fugue
From Italian fuga, meaning flight. It is a composition or section of a composition in imitative texture, that is based on a single subject and begins with successive statements of the subject in voices.
Subject
A themes, used especially for the main melody of a ricercare, fugue, or other imitative work.
Sonata
A baroque instrumental piece with contrasting sections or movements, often with imitative counterpoint.
Concerto
In the seventeenth century, an ensemble of instruments or of voices with one or more instruments, or a work for such an ensemble. A concerto grosso is an instrumental work that exploits the contrast in sonority between a small ensemble of solo instruments (concertino), usually the same forces that appeared in the trial sonata, and a large ensemble (concerto grosso).
Ritornello Form
In a fast movement of a concerto, the recurring thematic material played at the beginning by the full orchestra and repeated, usually in varied form, throughout the movement, and at the end.
