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Absolute Music
Music for the sake of music, not explicitly about anything unlike programmatic music. The idea developed at the end of the 18th century through the writings of Romanticists, although the term was coined by Richard Wagner in 1846 when he used it in a program note for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
Acciacatura
Short grace note intended to be played entirely before the beat it is connected to. Used often in the Classical period.
Afro-American Symphony
1930 composition by William Grant Still, it was the first symphony written by an African American and the most performed American symphony until 1950. Combines fairly traditional symphonic form with blues progressions and rhythms that were characteristic of popular African American music of the time. Features tenor banjo and uses poems from Paul Laurence Dunbar as epigraphs for each movement.
Ars nova
Literally translates to New Art, term coined by Phillipe de Vitry. Replaced the restrictions of ars antiqua (rhythmic modes, etc.), featured greater rhythmic variety, duple instead of triple meter, and increased independence in part writing.
Ballad Opera
English style of comic opera that developed during the 18th century, featured satire and new words adapted to existing ballads or folk songs. Spoken words interspersed with song, similar to musical theatre. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) is a prominent example.
Bel canto
Literally “beautiful singing” 18th and 19th century Italian technique of singing, more lyrical style as opposed to declamatory style. Combined vocal agility with beautiful tone, legato phrasing, and virtuosic passages with flawless technique. Rossini and Bellini were two notable composers in this style.
Brandenburg Concerto
6 concerto grossi written by J.S. Bach for Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg in 1721. Notable for being remarkably innovative in their unusual combinations of instruments and movement away from standard concerto grosso form.
Cantata
multi-movement work that is intended to be sung, as opposed to the instrumental sonata. 17th Italian cantatas were both secular (chamber cantata) and sacred (church cantata). During the 18th century it became more theatrical, and by the 19th century it developed to become more of a sacred oratorio.
Cantus Firmus Mass
Type of polyphonic mass using a pre-existing melody, the cyclic mass was the standard type of mass composition during the 15th century. At first the cantus firmus was drawn from plainchant, but gradually widened to include other sacred sources and even popular songs. Missa Caput is a most prominent example, it influenced Guillaume du Fay and Johannes Ockeghem.
Clavecin
French term for harpsichord.
Conservatoire de Paris
Important music conservatory in France that taught such important composers as Debussy, Dukas, Messiaen, Faure, and the Boulangers.
Contenance angloise
British polyphonic style of the 15th century that featured an emphasis on harmonies containing thirds and sixths, John Dunstable is a noteworthy example.
Courtly love
The topic of much medieval secular music, typically about a relationship between a knight and married noble lady. Developed by troubadours in southern France.
The Creation
1798 oratorio by Joseph Haydn based on the Book of Genesis and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, utilizes extensive word painting, a large orchestra (for the time), and the musical language of the mature Classical period.
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Martial arts movie from 2000 that featured a soundtrack by Tan Dun, a Chinese-American composer. Tan Dun won and was nominated for many awards for his score which blends both Western and Eastern musical influences.
Dido and Aeneas
Exoticism
During the Enlightenment in 18th century Europe, people began to become fascinated with Eastern cultures. Beginning with Turkish influences in the music of composers such as Mozart, by the Romantic period composers had begun to borrow foreign scales and modes like the pentatonic scale. Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly is a notable example.
Florentine Camerata
A group of humanists, poets, musicians, and intellectuals who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi in the late Renaissance to discuss trends in the arts. Led to the development of the stile recitativo which in turn led to more dramatic music composition and eventually the creation of opera.
Forms fixe
Secular music forms based on the poetic forms of the ballade, rondeux, and virelai. Phillipe de vitry typically cited as the first composer to use these. Guillame de Machaut and Guillame Du Fay make up the majority of the repertoire.
Gaelic Symphony
Symphony composed by Amy Beach. First symphony composed and published by an American Woman. Used Irish and Scottish melodies in the composition. 4 movements of contrasting character.
Grand Opera
Grand opera is a genre of 19th-century opera generally in four or five acts, characterized by large-scale casts and orchestras. The original productions consisted of spectacular design and stage effects with plots normally based on or around dramatic historic events. Les Huegenots by Meyerbeer and Guillaume Tell by Rossini are examples.
Gregorian Chant
Monophonic, unaccompanied liturgical music of the Medieval era. Texts codified and ordained by Pope Gregory the Great. Sung in Latin.
Harmonices musices odhecaton A
Anthology of polyphonic secular songs published by Ottaviano Petrucci in 1501 in Venice. First book of polyphonic music to be printed using movable type.
Heiligenstadt Testament
A letter written by Beethoven to his brothers in 1802 in which he revealed his progressing deafness and his resulting mental issues and withdrawal from society. Marks the beginning of his middle ‘Heroic’ period.
Indeterminancy
Indeterminacy is a modernist composing approach in which some aspects of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter’s free choice. Charles Ives was an early user of this technique, John Cage and the New York School are who it is popularly attributed to.
Intermezzo
The Renaissance intermezzo was also called the intermedio. It was a masque-like dramatic piece with music, which was performed between the acts of a play at Italian court festivities on special occasions, especially weddings. The intermezzo, in the 18th century, was a comic operatic interlude inserted between acts or scenes of an opera seria. In the 19th century, the intermezzo acquired another meaning: an instrumental piece which was either a movement between two others in a larger work or a character piece that could stand on its own.
Lieder
German art song most prominent during the 19th century in which a romantic poem is elevated by a composer to new heights through being set to music. Techniques such as word painting are used to heighten the emotional impact of the words.
Mannerism
Arose during later years of the Italian High Renaissance, artistic characteristic is exaggerating certain aesthetic qualities. Also a style of highly florid and contrapuntally complex polyphonic music made in France in the late 14th century. This period is now usually referred to as the ars subtilior.
The Marriage of Figaro
Considered one of the greatest operas ever written, it was an opera buffa written by Mozart in 1786. The music serves to heighten the emotional and expressive characteristics of the story.
Minimalism
Post-modern compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. Steve Reich and Phillip Glass are often credited with developing this technique.
Musique concrete
Developed by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s, it is a type of music composition that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material. Sounds are often modified through the application of audio signal processing and tape music techniques, and may be assembled into a form of sound collage.
Neoclassicism
Twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the interwar period, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of “classicism”, namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint. Can be thought of as a reaction against the unrestrained emotion of the Romantic period, composers such as Igor Stravinsky looked back to the Classical and Baroque periods and combined these forms with modern harmonic language.
Notre Dame polyphony
Used by composers such as Leonin and Perotin during the 13th century, consisted of organum (plainchant with at least one additional voice for added harmony). These motets were polyphonic, with a different text in each voice, and employed rhythmic modes.
Oratorio
A large-scale musical composition on a sacred or semi-sacred subject, for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. An oratorio’s text is usually based on scripture, and the narration necessary to move from scene to scene is supplied by recitatives sung by various voices to prepare the way for airs and choruses. The principal schools of oratorios are the Italian, essentially a form of religious opera; the German, developed from treatment of the Passion story; and the English, synthesized by the composer George Frideric Handel from several forms.
Paired Imitation
A technique employed by Josquin des Prez in which a four voiced texture is divided into two answering pairs, which results in an antiphonal effect from the duos echoing. Spread throughout 16th century vocal music due to the popularity of des Prez’s music.
Parlor songs
Songs composed primarily in the 19th century that were designed to be performed at home by amateur singers and pianists. Stephen Foster’s parlor songs featured simple accompaniment, memorable melodies, and expressive chromaticism and harmonies.
Prima donna
In 19th century Italy they were the leading woman in an opera company who would perform the leading roles, typically the principal soprano. Sometimes led to rivalries between supporters of the prima donnas of competing companies.
Pope Marcellus Mass
A freely composed Renaissance setting of the Mass Ordinary composed by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Written sometime around 1562, it combines the imitative polyphony of his earlier style with the simpler homorhythm and declamatory style needed after the Council of Trent.
Program Symphony
A piece of program music that uses the established form of a symphony to describe a nonmusical story or idea, developed during the Romantic period. Beethoven’s 6th “Pastoral” Symphony while not a program symphony clearly utilizes this idea, and Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz is a clear example of a program symphony
Reform Opera
A combination of characteristics of Italian opera seria and French opera that arose during the early Classical period, composers like Gluck sought to return to the origins of opera by focusing on human drama and making the music and words equally important. Featured simpler melodies, more syllabic singing, and more involved accompaniment. Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice is a good example.
Ritornello Form
Reoccurring passage in Renaissance and Baroque music, the Baroque concerto standardized by Vivaldi utilized Solo/Ritornello form unlike Sonata form in the Classical concerto.
Sacred concerto
a 17th-century genre of sacred music, characterized as settings of religious texts requiring both vocal soloists and obbligato instrumental forces for performance. Starting from Italian models, the genre flourished primarily in Germany. It is a broad term for various genres of chamber concerto for a small number of voices and instruments popular in Germany during the 17th century and prefiguring the late baroque church cantata and solo sacred cantata forms.
Scivias
An illustrated work by Hildegard von Bingen written around 1151 or 1152 that describes the religious visions that she had, includes 14 monophonic songs and the first example of a morality play Ordo Virtutum.
Second Viennese School
The group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and close associates in early 20th-century Vienna. Their music was initially 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.
String Quartet 1931
A modernist work by Ruth Crawford Seeger. It has been regarded as a collection of experimental procedures she developed during the previous two years, including dissonant counterpoint, early serial techniques, formal symmetries, and number centricity.
Toccata
A musical composition usually for organ or harpsichord in a free and improvisatory style characterized by full chords, rapid runs, and high harmonies, designed to showcase the performer’s virtuosity. Developed during the Renaissance, Baroque toccatas became even more complex.
Tone Poem
A piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. Developed as a consequence of Romanticism. Franz List and Richard Strauss are the two most prominent composers of tone poems.
Total Serialism
Integral serialism or total serialism is the use of series for aspects such as duration, dynamics, and register as well as pitch, used by composers such as Pierre Boulez. Expanded on the ideas of Schoenberg’s 12-tone serialism.
Tragedie Lyrique
A genre of French Baroque opera introduced by Jean-Baptiste Lully and used by his followers until the second half of the eighteenth century. Operas in this genre are usually based on stories from classical mythology or the Italian romantic epics of Tasso and Ariosto and contain elaborate arias.
Virtuosos
Musicians with remarkable technical skills, used to describe vocalists in the 17th century, in the 19th century expanded to include instrumentalists. Virtuosos such as Paganini and Liszt cultivated a “rock-star” persona and were the subject of much myth and speculation due to their mastery of their instrument and use of complicated extended techniques in their original compositions.
