I. Introduction to Music Theory and the Music of India Flashcards
The highness or lowness of a sound.
Pitch
Two ethnomuscicologists who grouped instruments into four categories.
Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbostel
Violins, harps, and guitars. Have one or more strings, which are plucked, bowed, or struck.
Chordophones
Wind instruments, such as the many varieties of horns and flutes produce sound by directly vibrating a column of air.
Aerophones
Have a skin or other membrane stretched across some kind of frame. The membrane vibrates when struck.
Membranophones
The body of the instrument itself vibrates when struck. Examples are bells, woodblocks, and xylophones.
Idiophones
Instruments are usually bowed or plucked.
Strings
Instruments, aerophones made of metal, are sounded by the performer’s buzzing lips, which make the column of air vibrate.
Brass
Instruments are also aerophones in which the column of air is moved by breath alone, as in the case of flutes or by one or two vibrating reeds usually made form wood.
Woodwind
Instruments include membranophones as well as idiophones, plus some chordophones that are struck rather than bowed or plucked.
Percussion
Some cases, these instruments constitute a 5th category.
Keyboard
These instruments may have a neck attached to a resonating body and may or may not have frets, metal bars or strings arrayed across the instrument’s neck at pitch intervals.
String instruments
The distance between any two adjacent keys on the keyboard. Semitone.
Half step
The distance between every other key (regardless of color, black or white).
Whole step
A sequence of pitches in ascending or descending order.
Scale
White keys on a keyboard are called?
Natural keys
Pitch intervals smaller than half-steps. Not available on most Western keyboard instruments.
Microtones (Shruti)
“Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti”
Solfege
A series of successive pitches perceived by the ear to form a coherent whole. One pitch at a time.
Melody
Two pitches occur together, then you have a ____________. Occurs when chords are used systematically in a musical piece.
Harmony
The scale in which you sing Do-Re-Mi.
Natural Scale
The way music is organized in time.
Rhythm
The steady pulse that underlies most music.
Beat
The _______ of a piece might remain steady for the duration of the piece, or it may slow down or increase a the piece progresses.
Tempo
When the notes of a musical piece express the base underlying tempo of its beats, this may be called ________________.
Single speed
When two sounds occur in the space of one beat, this may be called ____________.
Double speed
The first beat of a grouping is often the strongest, so it is customarily called the ___________ or strong beat.
Downbeat
Rhythm is _____________ when accented or emphasized notes fall on weak beats, or in between beats.
Syncopated
A tone sounding continually as a background to a performance.
Drone
India’s traditional music, and that of many other world cultures is considered ________ rather than a harmonic system.
Melodic
Has a specific musical meaning. It describes the number of things that are going on at once in a piece of music.
Texture
A song my consist of a single, unaccompanied melodic line. In Western theory this is called ______________. When multiple instruments or voices may be playing a single melodic line and if they are all performing the same pitch at the same time. They are also playing the line in unison.
Monophony
If two or more performers are producing slightly different version of the same melody at the same time, but are not playing in precise unison, the texture is called ______________.
Heterophony
The quality, character, or “color” of a musical sound. The ________ of a pitch is affected by the individual’s voice or technique, and by the instrument’s material, shape, and density.
Timbre
Refers to the instrument or combination of instruments used, and it is among the most noticeable and distinctive features of a given piece of music. Describing the ________________ is fundamental to writing about a musical performance.
Instrumentation
The loudness and softness of a sound are useful to performers for expressive purposes.
Dynamics
A gradual increasing of volume and speed, and a matching use of higher and higher pitches, is a very common technique, which can be called _________________. This draws the listener in and raises the excitement level of a piece of music.
Intensification
Refers to localized embellishments on a melody. In Indian music, it is often difficult to separate this from the main melody. Still, this is considered to be at the heart of a melody’s expressiveness.
Ornamentation
Melody in which a number of pitches are sounded over a single syllable or instrumental.
Melisma (melismatic)
A category of music, usually named and recognized by a specific set of conventions.
Genre
A term that is used quite broadly in music and may overlap with genre. It usually refers to the particular set of techniques or conventions used by an individual or a group.
Style
This shapes a melody.
Tension and release
A cohesive musical thought. In “Happy Birthday,” the music for the first four words (“Happy birthday to you”) can be thought as a short ________.
Phrase
A set of phrases that make a complete melody, which plays a prominent role in a longer piece of music.
Theme
The idea of _____________ in Indian music is somewhat different form that in Western music. Indian _____________ are not written out in scores, rather they are learned aurally from a teacher and memorized.
Composition
May be pre-composed, memorized ahead of time.
Variations
Created anew at each performance.
Improvised
This is often used in Indian classical music and for singing the verses of songs in many regional, devotional, and popular genres.
Two-section scheme
A piece of music that is composed from beginning to end may be called ______________.
Through-composed
A form in which verses are sung alternating with a repetitive chorus or refrain.
Verse-chorus
The dominant language family of South India; includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.
Dravidian
The largest language family in India.
Indo-Aryan
Is spoken by a larger percentage of Indians than any other single language, and the government has designated it (and English) for official government use.
Hindi
Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Marathi, Punjabi, Nepali, Oriya, and Urdu.
Other languages of the Indo-Aryan family spoken across North India.
An Indo-Aryan language of scholarship, literature, and liturgy.
Sanskrit
Is an umbrella term for many streams of practice. it is the worship of deities who appear in many forms, as describe in local histories, or in widely shared epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
Hinduism
Some people trace the origins of formal music in India to the chants of priests performing rituals prescribed in ______, the earliest texts of Hinduism.
Vedas
Hindu devotion, expressed in poetry, song, and ritual as love, longing, and suffering in separation form the divine.
Bhakti (Personal love and longing for the divine)
A religion founded in Punjab in the 15th century.
Sikhism
The classical music system of North India.
Hindustani
The classical music system of South India.
Carnatic
Akashvani “Voice from the sky,” centered in New Delhi.
All India Radio
Doordarshan or “View from afar,” has broadcast since the 1970s.
National television service
The first Indian sound film.
Alam Ara
The Hindi-language film industry, largely based in Mumbai.
Bollywood
The Tamil-language film industry, named after a neighborhood in Chennai.
Kollywood
Sound organized in time.
Music
Indian instrument that has a long neck with metal frets. It has a resonator made of a gourd and covered with wood. Its metal strings are plucked with a metal plectrum. It also has metal strings, called sympathetic strings.
Sitar
12 different pitches in ascending order are called the ___________ scale?
Chromatic
The “home” or “fundamental” pitch on which a scale is based is called the __________.
Tonic
Is made up of three or more pitches, which are intentionally sounded simultaneously.
Chord
Describes how music is organized on a larger time scale, how units, such as sections, subsections, and lines, are combined to make larger structures. This is the architecture of music.
Form
Uses the principle of variation. Individual performers create spontaneous variations, extensions, or free explorations, of a melody.
Improvisation
Came to India with Arab traders by sea, and overland through the Khyber Pass from Iran, Turkey, and Central Asia.
Islam
Used to help attain a state of spiritual ecstasy.
Sama
Islamic mysticism, thrives across the Muslim world and is practiced in many branches, called “silsila.”
Sufism
Formal music, or art music, is based on a system of melodies called _______, and a system of rhythmic cycles called ________.
Raga and Tala
Created by doubling the vibrations of a pitch.
Octave
Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni
India’s solfege
