Glossary
Music glossary
365 definitions · page 3 of 7.
- hymn
- A simple religious song in several stanzas, sung in a church service by the congregation.
- idee fixe
- (French, "fixed idea") Term used by Berlioz for the theme representing his beloved in every movement of his Symphonie fantastique.
- imitation
- The successive repetition in different voices of a single musical idea.
- Impressionism
- A French art movement of the late nineteenth century that rejected Romanticism in favor of fleeting, informal scenes from everyday life. improvisation The spontaneous, on-the-spot creation of music, preserved today largely in jazz but common in Western music…
- intermedio
- In the Renaissance, a musical entertainment between the acts of a play.
- interpretation
- The manner in which a performer carries out a composer's performance directions.
- interval
- The acoustical distance between two pitches, usually reckoned by the number of intervening scale degrees.
- introduction
- A passage or section, often in a slow tempo, that prepares the way for a more extended section.
- inversion
- The playing of a melody upside down, with upward intervals played downwards and vice verse, most common in contrapuntal and serial music.
- irregular meter
- The mixture at a single rhythmic level of more than one metric grouping.
- jazz
- A style of performance developed largely by African-Americans after 1900; the most original form of American music in the twentieth century.
- jongleur
- jongleuress (zhong-ler;zhong-ler-ess)Male and female musical minstrels of the Middle Ages.
- K. numbers
- The common method of referring to works by Mozart, after the chronological catalogue first published by Ludwig Kochel in 1865.
- key
- (1) In tonal music, one of twelve possible tonalities organized around a triad built on the main note(2) on a keyboard, a lever pressed down to produce sound.
- key signature
- Sharps or flats placed at the beginning of a staff to indicate the key of a passage or work.
- largo
- larghetto Very slow tempo; less slow than largo.
- legato
- The smooth, seamless connection of adjacent notes in a melody.
- Leitmotiv
- A term adopted by Wagner's disciples to designate the "leading motives" in his operas.
- libretto
- A "little book" that contains the complete text of an opera, oratorio, and so forth.
- Lied
- (German, "song") A vocal piece dating back to the polyphonic Lied of the fourteenth century. The solo German Lied, accompanied by piano, reached its zenith during the nineteenth century.
- line
- A general term for a discrete voice or part in a vocal or instrumental composition.
- liturgical drama
- A sung religious dialogue that flourished during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Liturgical in spirit even when performed outside the formal liturgy, liturgical dramas were the most elaborate form of medieval music.
- lyre
- An ancient plucked string instrument in the shape of a box (Figure 5. 1), whose association with music especially with the mythological character Orpheus) is so strong that the word lyric is derived from it.
- madrigal
- A vocal form that arose in Italy during the sixteenth century and developed into the most ambitious secular form of the Renaissance.
- madrigalism
- An alternate term for wordpainting, reflecting the frequent use of word painting in the Renaissance madrigal.
- major mode
- One of two colorings applied to a key, characterized by the major scale and the resulting predominance of major triads. Generally sounds bright and stable.
- major scale
- A pattern of seven (ascending) notes, five separated by whole steps, with half steps between the third and fourth and the seventh and eighth degrees.
- major seventh
- A highly dissonant interval a half step smaller than an octave.
- major third
- An interval consisting of four half steps-, a major third forms the bottom interval of a major triad.
- major triad
- A triad consisting of a major third plus a minor third bounded by a perfect fifth.
- march
- A military style (or piece) characterized by strongly accented duple meter and clear sectional structures.
- Mass
- (1) The central worship service of the Roman Catholic Church; (2) the music written for that service.
- mazurka
- Polish folk dance in rapid triple meter with strong offbeat accents.
- measure
- (bar) The single recurrence of each regular pattern in a meter, consisting of a strong first beat and weaker subsidiary beats and set off in musical notation by vertical lines known as bar lines. melisma;melismatic (muh-liz-muh;mel-iz-mat-ic) Technique of…
- melody
- (1) The aspect of music having to do with the succession of single notes in a coherent arrangement; (2) a particular succession of such notes (also referred to as tune, theme, or voice).
- meter
- The organization of strong and weak beats into a regular, recurring pattern.
- metronome
- Mechanical (or, today, electrical) device that ticks (or blinks) out regular tempos from about 40 to 208 beats per minute.
- metronome marking
- A number, usually placed at the top of a piece, that indicates tempo by telling how many beats of a certain note value will be heard per minute, for example, J = 60.
- mezzo
- (met-zoh) Medium, as in mezzopiano (medium soft).
- microtones
- Intervals smaller than a half step.
- MIDI
- Acronym for "musical instrument digital interface," the industry-wide standard adopted in 1982 that permits personal computers and synthesizers to talk to one another.
- miniature
- A descriptive term for a short Romantic piece, usually for piano.
- minimalism
- A contemporary style marked by steady pulse, simple triadic harmonies, and insistent repetition of short melodic patterns.
- minor mode
- One of two colorings, generally dark and unstable, applied to a key, characterized by the minor scale and the resulting predominance of minor triads.
- minor scale
- The scale in which the third and sixth degrees are the lower of two options. The melodic minor scale raises the sixth and seventh degrees in ascending passages and lowers them in descending passages.
- minor third
- An interval consisting of three half steps; a minor third forms the bottom interval of a minor triad.
- minor triad
- A triad consisting of a minor third plus a major third bounded by a perfect fifth.
- minuet
- A seventeenth-century court dance in moderate triple meter that later served as the model for the third movement of Classical instrumental works. mode (1) In the Middle Ages, a means of organizing plainchant according to orientations around the seven-note…
- modulation
- The process of changing keys in a tonal work, as in "the modulation from C major to F minor."
- molto allegro
- Very fast tempo.
- monody
- A style of accompanied solo singing that evolved in the early Baroque in which the meaning of the text was expressed in a flexible vocal line.
- monophony
- monophonic (mo-nof-ony;mo-no-fonick) A musical texture consisting of a single voice, as in plainchant.
- Moog Robert
- American inventor of early synthesizers. During the 1970s his most popular synthesizer was itself known as "the Moog." morality play In the Middle Ages, a monophonic drama set to music to illustrate a moral point, such as the struggle between good and evil…
- motet
- A descriptive term for the several varieties of polyphonic vocal music, mostly sacred, from the Middle Ages to the present.
- motive
- The smallest coherent unit of a larger musical idea.
- movement
- A self-contained, largely independent portion of a larger piece, such as a symphony or concerto
- multi-timbral
- A descriptive term for the ability of a synthesizer to record different timbres simultaneously.
- multimedia
- Rapidly developing technology that enables information of all kinds-text, still images, moving pictures, sound-to be stored and retrieved on a single digital medium, such as CD-ROM or videodisc.
- music
- Broadly speaking, sounds organized to express a wide variety of human emotions.
- music drama
- Wagner's designation for his operas. musicology The scholarly study of music and its historical contexts.