Unit 5, Set-class Theory Flashcards
Music governed by a set of rules that consists of an arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions, and directionality. This musical language was primary in the Western classical music traditional from roughly the time of Bach to roughly the time of Brahms.
Tonal music
The term used to define the larger umbrella of music that exists outside of (often perceived as after) the tonal system of the common practice period. This music may have some governing principles, some that are even held over from tonality, but it generally lacks key and harmonic function in the traditional sense.
Post-tonal music
The term used more specifically to refer to music that lacks the tonal guiding principles and ambiguously brings to an equal playing field what is otherwise referred to as consonant or dissonant.
Atonal music
The musical focus on a specific pitch classes or triads, whether in tonal or post-tonal contexts.
Centricity
A specific note within a specific octave.
Pitch
All notes by a particular note name or interger, including all octave equivalents or enharmonic equivalents.
Pitch class
The system of numbers used to generalize pitch classes.
Integer notation
The wrap around point in a counting system. This would be 0 (zero) on a 12-tone clock face representation.
Modulus
The representation of the twelve pitch classes so that the numbers continuously wrap around (as on a clock face). This would be opposed to a representation of pitches on a timeline.
Modulo-12 (mod-12)
The absolute value in semitones between two given pitches.
Unordered pitch interval
The distance between two pitches that also includes a plus or minus indicating direction.
Ordered pitch interval
The distance between two given pitch classes concerned with the direction of travel. Distance is counted in a clock-wise fashion on the clock face from the starting pitch class to the ending pitch class.
Ordered pitch-class interval
The distance between two given pitch classes without concern for a direction of travel. It is simply the shortest available route between two pitch classes.
Unordered pitch-class interval
Another name for unordered pitch-class intervals, that generalizes many different pitch intervals, including compound intervals.
Interval class
The representation of the interval class content of a set into a standardized scoreboard-style string of numbers, indicated occurrences of each of the six interval classes.
Interval class vector
An unordered collection of pitch classes.
Pitch-class set
The most compressed way of writing a given pitch-class set (and left-compacted), which makes it easy to see the essential attributes of a set and compare it to other sets. This format will include the pitch-classes as expressed in a given instance. This standardized way of writing a collection of pitches uses square brackets, spaces, and commas to separate pitch classes.
Normal form
The process of moving a line of pitches by a certain interval, maintaining order of pitches and the intervallic relationship between each pitch.
Transposition
The process of flipping pitch relationships such that contour is reversed.
Inversion
The sum of n-semitones of transposition following a inversion (TnI) process.
Index number
The generalized collection of pitch classes represents all other transpositional or inversional equivalents within a family of pitch-class sets.
Set class
The most normal of all possible normal form spellings of a family of pitch-class sets, starting with 0 (zero), is the most compressed, and most left-compacted format. This standardized way of writing a collection of pitches uses parentheses, but not spaces or commas.
Prime form
The way which the music is divided into groupings of pitches for analysis.
Segmentation
A nested collection of pitch classes within a larger collection of pitch classes.
Subset
A larger collection of pitch classes that may contain smaller collections of pitch classes within it.
Superset
