Glossary

Music glossary

365 definitions · page 4 of 7.

musical theater: (musical) A hybrid form of twentieth-century American musical entertainment that incorporates elements of vaudeville, operetta, jazz, and popular song.
musique concrete: Natural sounds that have been recorded electronically.
mute: A mechanical device used with string and brass instruments to muffle the tone.
nationalism: A nineteenth-century political movement that led in music to the frequent use of national folk songs, styles, and historical subjects.
natural: (1) In musical notation, a sign -- -- indicating that the preceding accidental applied to this note is to be cancelled; (2) the name given to such a note, for example, C.
neoclassicism: A twentieth-century movement characterized by a selective and eclectic revival of the formal proportions and economical means of eighteenth century music.
neumatic: In plainchant, a style in which each syllable of text receives several notes.
neume: The stemless symbols used in medieval sources to notate plainchant (see Figure 4.12).
nocturne: ("night piece") A nineteenth-century character piece for piano.
non-imitative counterpoint: Same as unequal-voiced counterpoint.
non-legato: The slight separation of adjacent notes.
note: (1) A sound with a specific pitch and duration; (2) in musical notation, the symbol (e.g., J) for such a sound; (3) a single key on a keyboard.
octave: The interval in which one pitch is doubled (or halved) in frequency by another pitch. The octave is found in virtually all music systems.
Office: (Divine) The eight daily worship services, apart from the Mass, in the Roman Catholic Church.
ondes martenot: An early electronic instrument invented in the late 1920s by Maurice Martenot.
opera: A drama set to music; the dominant form of Western music from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.
opera buffa: A comic form of eighteenth-century Italian opera featuring everyday characters involved in outlandish plot intrigues.
opera seria: A serious, heroic form of eighteenth century opera featuring historical or mythological figures in stereotypical plots stressing the tension between love and duty.
operetta: A light, entertaining version of Romantic opera with spoken dialogue between numbers.
opus: A "work"; opus numbers were introduced by publishers in the seventeenth century to identify each of a composer's works.
oratorio: (English) A musical entertainment usually on a sacred subject and including recitatives, arias, choruses, and an overture.
orchestration: The designation of what instruments are to play what voices or notes in a composition. The process of orchestrating is often referred to as scoring.
Ordinary of the Mass: In the Roman Catholic liturgy, the five items (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) that arc part of every celebration of the Mass.
organ: An instrument in which air forced through pipes by mechanical means is controlled by one or more keyboards, including a foot-operated pedal keyboard.
organum: The earliest type of medieval polyphonic music, in which voices were added above a plainchant.
ornament: An embellishment, such as a trill, used to decorate a melodic line.
ostinato: A brief pattern repeated over and over again at the same pitch, often in the bass.
overtones: The spectrum of the higher-pitched frequencies that accompany the fundamental of any pitch and determine its tone color (also called harmonic or partials).
overture: An instrumental piece that precedes a dramatic work such as an opera (some overtures are nevertheless independent compositions).
paraphrase: The practice by Renaissance composers of embellishing or elaborating a cantus firmus in polyphonic vocal works.
parlante: Nineteenth-century operatic style in which the voices declaim in a rapid, speechlike manner against a backdrop of melody and accompaniment.
part: (1) One of the voices in a polyphonic work; (2) the written music for a single player in an ensemble.
partial: Same as overtone.
passacaglia: Baroque technique in which a brief melodic idea repeats over and over while the other voices are varied freely.
passage work: Descriptive term for figuration consisting of rapid runs and scales, common in keyboard music.
patch chords: On early synthesizers, the cables required to connect various components.
PCM: Pulse-code modulation. A more sophisticated method of sampling introduced into the consumer synthesizer market in the late 1980s.
pedal board: An organ's foot-operated keyboard.
pedal point: Long-held tones, usually in the bass of a polyphonic passage.
pentatonic scale: A five-note scale found in numerous non-Western musics and adopted as an exotic element by many twentieth-century Western composers.
percussion: Instruments, either tuned or untuned, that produce sounds by being struck, rattled, or scraped. Common percussion include drums, cymbals, and bells.
performance directions: Words or symbols provided by composers to instruct performers in how their music is to be played, including articulation, dynamics, expression, and phrasing.
period: The musical equivalent of a paragraph. period instrument An instrument of a type that was in use at the time a work was originally performed. phrase The coherent segments that make up a melody; roughly equivalent to a sentence in prose.
phrasing: The manner in which a performer organizes and presents the parts of a composition.
piano: A keyboard instrument whose tone is produced by hammers striking strings tightly stretched over a large soundboard. A foot pedal controls the damping of the strings.
pizzicato: Playing a string instrument that is normally bowed by plucking the strings with the finger.
plainchant: (plainsong, Gregorian chant) Monophonic unison music sung during Catholic church services since the Middle Ages.
poles of attraction: A term introduced by Stravinsky to describe the harmonic equilibrium of his neoclassical works.
polyphony: polyphonic (po-lif-ony;poly-fon-ick)A musical texture in which the individual voices move independently of one another.
polyrhythm: A texture in which the rhythms of various voices seem to exist independently of one another.
POP: Post Office Protocol. Popular but inflexible email retrieval standard. All messages are downloaded at the name time and can only be manipulated on a client machine. Current version is POP3. Also see IMAP.
pop: A generic term for popular music in contemporary America, overlapping but not identical with rock.
postmodern: A term adopted around the mid- 1970s to describe our current eclectic, experimental age.
prelude: An introductory piece (though Chopin and other nineteenth-century composers wrote independent preludes).
premiere: The first public performance of a musical or dramatic work.
prepared piano: In contemporary music, the modifying of a traditional grand piano by such techniques as placing various objects between the strings.
presto: prestissimo Very fast; extremely fast.
primary area: In a movement in sonata form, the first stage in an exposition; establishes the tonic key with one or more themes.
program music: An instrumental work associated explicitly by the composer with a story or other extramusical idea.
Proper of the Mass: The parts of the Mass that vary from day to day according to the church calendar.