Glossary

Music glossary

365 definitions · page 2 of 7.

compound meters: Duple or triple meters in which the individual beats are subdivided into triple units.
concertina: The solo group in a Baroque concerto grosso.
concerto: An instrumental composition for orchestra and soloist (or a small group of soloists).
concerto grosso: The principal variety of Baroque concerto, for a small group of soloists (the concertino) and a larger ensemble (the ripieno).
disco: A style of popular dance music characterized by slick, ostinato-like rhythms and propulsive, repetitive lyrics.
disjunct motion: Melodic motion by a leap rather than by a step.
dissonance: Intervals or chords that sound impure, harsh, or unstable.
dominant: (1) The fifth degree of the diatonic scale. (2) the triad built on this degree; (3) the key oriented around this degree.
dominant seventh chord: A dominant triad with an added seventh degree-for example, G-B-D-F. dotted rhythm The alternation of LONG and short notes, named after the notation used to record them.
downbeat: A strong or accented beat, most frequently the first beat of a measure.
drone: A sustained tone (a kind of permanent pedal point) over which a melody unfolds.
duet: A composition for two performers.
duple meter: The regular grouping of beats into twos (STRONG-weak). The most common duple meters have two or four beats per measure. dynamics The relative softness or loudness of a note or passage.
electronic music: Music in which some or all of the sounds are produced by electronic generators. embellishment An ornamental addition to a simpler melody.
ensemble: (1) A group of performers; (2) a musical number in an opera, oratorio, or cantata sung by two or more performers; (3) the extent to which a group of performers coordinate their performance.
entry: In an imitative texture, the beginning of each statement of the theme.
envelope: The graphic representation of a sound's attack, duration, and pattern of decay.
episode: (1) In a fugue, a freer passage between full statements of the subject; (2) in ritornello form, a freer concertina passage between ripieno statements of the ritornello.
espressivo: Expressively.
estampie: A type of early instrumental (perhaps dance) music consisting of independent sections strung together.
Etude: A musical piece designed to address a particular technical problem on an instrument.
exposition: The first section of a movement in sonata form.
expression: (I)The general character of a passage or work; (2) the blend of feeling and intellect brought to a performance by the performer.
Expressionism: A short-lived Austro-German art movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, marked by a focus on the dark, mysterious side of the human mind.
Fauvism: The French version of Austro-German Expressionism.
fermata: In musical notation, a sign (-) indicating the prolongation of a note or rest beyond its notated value.
figure: (1) In Baroque and Classical music, the numbers below a staff designating the harmonies to be filled in above; (2) a general term for a brief melodic pattern.
figured bass: The Baroque system of adding figures to a bass line, indicating what harmonies are to be improvised on each beat.
final: In plainchant, the concluding note in a mode; corresponds roughly to the tonic note in a tonal scale.
finale: (1) The last movement of an instrumental work; (2) the large ensemble that concludes an act in an opera.
fine arts: The realm of human experience characterized as aesthetic rather than practical or utilitarian, including music, painting, dance, theater, and film.
fingerboard: A piece of wood extending from the body of a string instrument; the strings are attached to the end of the fingerboard.
flat: (1) In musical notation, a sign (6) indicating that the note it precedes is to be played a half step lower; (2) the term used to specify a particular note, for example, B6.
FMsynthesis: Frequency-modulation synthesis;a superior version of electronic synthesis introduced in the consumer market by Yamaha in 1982.
folk music: Music indigenous to a particular ethnic group, usually preserved and transmitted orally.
form: A term used to designate standardized musical shapes, such as binary form or sonata form.
forte: fortissimo Loud; very loud.
fortepiano: The wooden-framed eighteenth-century piano used by Mozart, Haydn, and their contemporaries.
fragmentation: The technique of developing a them,, by dividing it into smaller units, most common in the music of the Viennese Classicists.
frequency: In acoustics, the number of times per second that the air carrying a sound vibrates as a wave. fret A raised strip across the fingerboard of a stringed instrument, designed to produce a specific pitch when stopped at that point.
frottola: A light, popular Italian song, a precursor of the Italian madrigal.
fugato: A fugal passage within a composition.
fugue: A polyphonic composition that makes systematic use of imitation, usually based on a single subject, and that opens with a series of exposed entries on that subject.
fundamental: The basic pitch of a tone.
gamelan: A small Javanese orchestra consisting mainly of metal percussion instruments.
genre: The term used to identify a general category of music that shares similar performance forces, formal structures, and/or style-for example, "string quartet" or " 1 2-bar blues."
glissando: Rapid sliding from one note to another, usually on continuous-pitch instruments such as the trombone or violin, but also on discrete-pitch instruments such as the piano or harp.
ground: (bass) A repeating pattern, usually in the bass, over which a melody unfolds, as in Dido's lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.
half cadence: An intermediate cadence, usually on the dominant chord, within a musical period.
half step: (semitone) The interval between any two adjacent notes on a keyboard; the smallest interval in common use in Western music.
harmonic: (1) In acoustics, a synonym for overtone or partial; (2) in string playing, a high-pitched, whistling tone made by bowing a lightly stopped string. harmonic minor scale The scale that results from flatting the third and sixth degrees of the major scale…
harmonize: To provide a melody with a chordal accompaniment.
harmony: (1) In general, the simultaneous aspects of music; (2) specifically, the simultaneous playing of two or more different sounds.
harpsichord: A Baroque keyboard instrument in which the strings are plucked by quills.
head: The beginning of a theme.
heavy metal: A descriptive term for rock bands since the 1970s whose heavily amplified electric and percussion sounds have been associated with youthful rebellion and defiance.
heterophony: (heter-off-ony) A texture in which two or more variations of the same melody are performed simultaneously, common in folk music.
hexachord: the six usable degrees of the modal scale, often used to organize Renaissance music.
hocket: In late medieval polyphony, the alternation of short melodic phrases (or even single notes) between two voices.
homophony: homophonic (ho-mof-ony;homo-fonick) Texture in which all the voices move more or less together (often referred to as the chordal style).