Vocal music without instrumental accompaniment.

Notes that are not normally found in a given key.

A person who works in the area of acoustic technology.

A person who studies the theory and science of acoustics.

The study of how sound behaves in physical spaces.

Refers to how high the wave form appears to vibrate above zero when seen on an oscilloscope; louder sounds create higher oscilloscope amplitude readings.

A musical composition of celebration, usually used as a symbol for a distinct group, particularly the national anthems of countries. Originally, and in music theory and religious contexts, it also refers more particularly to short sacred choral work and still more particularly to a specific form of Anglican.

A genre of sacred music featuring multiple choirs, or a choir that has been divided into different groups that can perform call and responses.

Homophonic compositions featuring a solo singer over orchestral accompaniment. Arias are very melodic primarily utilized in operas, cantatas, and oratorios.

A composition setting a poem to music, generally for one solo voice and piano accompaniment; in German, a Lied.

Music that seeks to avoid both the traditional rules of harmony and the use of chords or scales that provide a tonal center.

A song form used often in folk music, which is used to tell a story that usually contains a moral or lesson.

See "measure".

Continuous realization of harmony throughout a musical piece, usually played by a harpsichord and/or cello. The Basso continuo provides a framework/template for harmonic accompaniments.

The basic unit of time in music.

A style of small group jazz developed in the late 1940s, which featured fast moving harmonies, angular melodies, and highly complex rhythms.

Large jazz ensembles (15-20 members) popular in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The term “Big Band” also refers to the era in which these bands were popular.

A variation of country music featuring fiddle, guitar, mandolin, bass guitar, and the five-string banjo that developed largely in the Appalachian region.

A style of music that, at the turn of the 20th century, began to form out of African American work songs, field hollers, and spirituals. Today, the word “blues” is used loosely and can refer to feeling sad or down, to any song played in a bluesy style, or more specifically, to a song that follows a blues form, which is a twelve-bar strophic song form.

Instruments traditionally made of brass or another metal (and thus often producing a “bright” or “brassy” tone) whose sound is generated by blowing into a mouthpiece that is attached to a coiled tube.

A style of Musical Theatre, which integrated a cohesive plot with songs and dances that advanced that plot. Broadway specifically refers to the street of the same name in New York City that became known for this style.

The ending of a musical phrase providing a sense of closure, often through the use of one chord that resolves to another.

A section of a concerto in which the soloist plays alone without the orchestra in an improvisatory and virtuosic style.

A major composite church choral form of music from the Baroque period that involves soloist, choir, and orchestra. Cantatas have several movements and last for fifteen to thirty minutes. Cantatas are performed without staging but they utilize narration, arias, recitatives, choruses, and smaller vocal ensembles.

Music such as art songs, piano character pieces, and string quartets, primarily performed in small performing spaces, often for personal entertainment.

In general any lyric-driven French song, usually polyphonic and secular. A singer specializing in chansons is known as a “chanteur” (male) or “chanteuse” (female). A collection of chansons, especially from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, is known as a chansonnier.

Text set to a melody written in monophonic texture with un-notated rhythms typically used in religious worship.

Director of music, secular and sacred, for the courts’ official functions and entertainment.

A type of folk song designed to teach a simple lesson. They are often simple to sing and easy to remember.

Originally the result from the German protestant church’s reformation, the chorale is the hymn (tune) in a four-part homophonic work that is sung by the church congregation. Some chorales became the foundation for cantatas and chorale preludes for organ.

The simultaneous sounding of three or more pitches; like intervals, chords can be consonant or dissonant.

A series of chords.

Musical pitches which move up or down by successive half-steps.

A style of composition which uses notes that are not a part of the predominant scale of a composition or one of its sections.

Sacred music written for performance in church, or any musical setting of ecclesiastical liturgy, or music set to words expressing propositions of a sacred nature, such as a hymn. Church Music Director is a position responsible the musical aspects of the church’s activities.

An optional final section of a movement that reasserts the home key of the movement and provides a sense of conclusion.

The process whereby a musician notates musical ideas using a system of symbols or using some other form of recording.

A composition for a soloist or a group of soloists and an orchestra, generally in three movements in fast, slow, and fast tempos, respectively.

A musical composition for a small group of soloists and orchestra.

The individual who leads an orchestra or ensemble.

A melody that moves mostly by step, in a smooth manner.

Term used to describe intervals and chords that tend to sound sweet and pleasing to our ears; consonance, as opposed to dissonance, is stable and needs no resolution.

A renaissance consort is a group of renaissance instrumentalists playing together. A whole consort is an ensemble performing with instruments from the same family. A broken consort is an ensemble comprised of instruments from more than one family.

A mixture of rock rhythm sections and a singer singing with a country accent about many of the same topics that traditional country singers have used over the decades.

Generally refers to music with jazz, gospel, and funk roots that uses electronic instruments, drums, horns, and vocals.

A divided choir that is utilized to perform in a polychoral style—able to perform “call and response”. Large churches were designed with multiple choir seating sections to perform such works.

The preservation movement or “Counter-Reformation” against the protestant reform led to the development of the Jesuit order (1540) and the later assembling of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) which considered issues of the church’s authority and organizational structure.

A term describing a broad variety of musical styles including Bluegrass, Hillbilly Music, and Contemporary Country. Generally speaking, most types of music that fall under this category originated in the American South (although it also encompasses Western Swing and cowboy songs) and features a singing style with a distinctly rural southern accent, as well as an instrumentation that favors string instruments such as the banjo, guitar, or fiddle.

Love for a beloved, without any concern for whether or not the love will be returned, called “courtly” because it was praised by those participating in medieval courts.

A definition of frequency of vibration; replaced by Hertz in 1960.

An instruction, commonly found at the end of the B section or Trio of a Minuet and Trio, that tells the performers to return to the “head” or first section, generally resulting in an A-B-A form.

Music written for dancing. The instrumentation of various types of folk dance music varies with the style.

The middle section of a sonata form in which the themes and key areas introduced in the exposition are developed.

A melody with wide leaps and rapid changes in direction.

Intervals and chords that tend to sound harsh to our ears; dissonance is often used to create tension and instability, and the interplay between dissonance and consonance provides a sense of harmonic and melodic motion in music.

An early form of jazz developed in New Orleans during the turn of the 20th century featuring syncopated rhythms, improvised solos and harmonies, as well as a common instrumentation that included trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, trombone, tuba, banjo, piano, guitar, and drums.

A form of the first movement of a Classical period concerto that combines the exposition, development, and recapitulation of sonata form with the ritornello form used for the first movements of Baroque concertos; also called first-movement concerto form.

A sustained pitch or pitches often found in music of the Middle Ages or earlier and in folk music.

The variation in the volume of musical sound (the amplitude of the sound waves).

(German, meaning “electronic music”) Music composed by manipulating only electronically-produced sounds (not recorded sounds).

The process of raising or lowering different frequencies of sound, either in a recording, or within a tone (overtones).

The first section of a sonata form, in which the themes and key areas of the movement are introduced; the section normally modulates from the home key to a different key.

Style of composition where composers intentionally use atonality. Arnold Schoenberg devised a system of composing using twelve tones. His students Alban Berg and Anton Webern composed extensively in this twelve-tone style.

A term used to describe a wide variety of musical forms that developed within different cultures, often for different reasons. Folk music is often passed down not through written music, but orally from one generation to another.

The structure of the phrases and sections within a musical composition.

How quickly or slowly a medium (solid, liquid, gas) vibrates and produces a sound.

A raised strip on the neck of a stringed instrument. Frets usually extend across the full width of the neck and divide the string into half steps for most western musical instruments. Most guitars have frets.

Perfected by J.S. Bach during the baroque period, fugues are a form written in an imitative contrapuntal style in multiple parts. Fugues are based upon their original tune that is called the subject. The subject is then imitated and overlapped by the other parts called the answer, countersubject, stretto, and episode.

The lowest pitch in the harmonic series.

A form of Renaissance dance and music popular all over Europe in the 16th century.

A medieval music theorist who developed a system of lines and spaces that enabled musicians to notate the specific notes in a melody.

Any simultaneous combination of tones and the rules governing those combinations. The way a melody is accompanied is also another way to define harmony.

The momentary shifting from a duple to a triple feel or vice versa.

The unit of frequency defined as one cycle per second and named after Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) in 1960.

An early form of country music, Hillbilly Music was an alternative to the jazz and dance music of the 1920s and was portrayed as wholesome music of the “good old days.”

Musical texture comprised of one melodic line accompanied by chords.

Music where the melody is supported by a chordal accompaniment. Homophony is generally the opposite of polyphony where the voices are imitative and weave with each other.

A country combo style that became quite popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Originally performed in saloons known as “honky tonks," many of the songs dealt with subjects associated with honky tonks such as infidelity and drinking.

Religious song, most generally having multiple strophes of the same number and length of lines and using strophic form.

A melodic motive that appears in all five movements of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique to represent the beloved from the program.

Music composed based on the composer’s impression of an object, concept, or event. This style includes the use of chromaticism, whole-tone scales and chords, exotic scales, new chord progressions, and more complex rhythms.

The act of creating melodies and harmonies on the spot without reading the music off a page.

The instruments comprising a musical group (including the human voice).

The distance in pitch between any two notes.

The accompanying dance tune for an energetic folk dance usually in a compound meter.

The set of pitches on which a composition is based.

Instruments that are characterized by keyboards, such as the piano, organ, vibraphone, and accordion.

An ensemble formed by linking laptop computers and speakers together to generate live and/or recorded performances using both synthesized and pre-recorded sounds.

“Guiding motive” associated with a specific character, theme, or locale in a music drama, and first associated with the music of Richard Wagner.

The text or actual words of an opera, musical, cantata, or oratorio, written or compiled by a librettist.

A musical piece for several solo voices set to a short poem. They originated in Italy around 1520. Most madrigals were about love.

Catholic celebration of the Eucharist consisting of liturgical texts set to music by composers starting in the Middle Ages.

A Polish dance in triple time, with emphasis on beat 2.

A unit of time that contains a specific number of beats defined by the meter/time signature.

Multiple pitches sung to one syllable of text.

A succession of single tones in musical compositions.

The way in which the beats are grouped together in a piece.

An American form of theatre developed in the 19th century and featuring white performers in blackface performing in a variety show, which depicted black characters as happy participants in romanticized versions of the American slave south.

A form based on the minuet dance that consists of a Minuet (A), then a contrasting Trio (B), followed by a return to the Minuet (A).

Musical texture comprised of one melodic line; a melodic line may be sung by one person or 100 people.

A highly varied sacred choral musical composition. The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music.

The smallest musical unit of a melody, generally a single rhythm of two or three pitches.

The constant repeated subdivision of the beat. The motor rhythm provides unity and stability within a musical piece.

A subsection or independent section/piece of a larger work.

Sound and silence organized in time.

A type of dramatic performance that tells a story through dialogue, with singing and dancing added to support and move the plot along.

(French, meaning "concrete music") A type of electro-acoustic music that uses both electronically produced sounds (like synthesizers) and recorded natural sounds (like instruments, voices, and sounds from nature).

Pride in one’s nation or cultural identity, often expressed in art, literature, and music.

A musical movement that arose in the 20th century as a reaction against romanticism and which sought to recapture classical ideals like symmetry, order, and restraint. Stravinsky’s music for the ballet Pulcinella (1920) is a major early neoclassical composition.

(Dixieland) An early form of jazz developed in New Orleans during the turn of the twentieth century featuring syncopated rhythms, improvised solos and harmonies, as well as a common instrumentation that included trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, trombone, tuba, banjo, piano, guitar, and drums.

A disorganized sound with no observable pitch.

The distance between two musical pitches where the higher pitch vibrates exactly twice as many times per second as the lower

A staged musical drama for voices and orchestra. Operas are fully blocked and performed in costume with sets. Operas utilize arias and recitatives with no narration.

Comic style of opera made famous by Mozart.

Serious style of 18th-century opera made famous by Handel that generally features mythology or high-born characters and plots.

A “light opera” developed in the 19th century that required classically trained singers, but featured less complex music than a typical opera.

A major work with religious or contemplative characters for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. Oratorios do not utilize blocking, costumes, or scenery.

An electronic device that displays a visual representation of the different types of sound waves.

Musical tones heard above a fundamental pitch.

The sounds of different frequency that naturally occur above a fundamental (primary) tone.

A slow processional dance common in Europe during the 16th century Renaissance.

Instruments that are typically hit or struck by the hand, with sticks, or with hammers or that are shaken or rubbed by hand.

See instrumentation.

Smaller sub-sections of a melody.

A tone that is composed of an organized sound wave.

The plucking of a bowed string instrument such as the violin, producing a percussive effect.

Ending of a musical phrase or composition that consists of a IV (subdominant) chord moving to a I (tonic) chord and most often associated with church music.

A compositional style where the chorus/choir is divided into two or more groups that can perform independently or independently with each other (see antiphonal).

Musical texture that simultaneously features two or more relatively independent and important melodic lines.

Two or more different rhythms played at the same time.

A compositional technique where two or more instruments or voices in different keys (tonal centers) perform together at the same time.

A musical movement that arose as a reaction against musical impressionism and which focused on the use of strong rhythmic pulse, distinct musical ideas, and a tonality based on one central tone as a unifying factor instead of a central key or chord progression.

Instrumental music intended to represent something extra-musical such as a poem, narrative, drama, or picture, or the ideas, images, or sounds therein. A descriptive piece.

Program music in the form of a multi-movement composition for orchestra.

A type of folk song written to directly, or by suggestion, voice complaints about some injustice.

A musical genre developed near the turn of the 20th century that featured syncopated rhythms. The style became nationally popular after being widely published as sheet music.

The number of pitches, expressed as an intervallic distance.

A form of spoken words delivered over a beat. It can be improvised or written out in advance.

The third and final section of a sonata form, in which the themes of the exposition return, now in the home key of the movement.

An operatic number of speech-like melodies and rhythms, performed in a flexible tempo to sparse accompaniment which is most often provided by the basso continuo. Recitatives are often performed before arias and have texts that tend to be descriptive and narrating.

A succession and division from the practices of the Roman Catholic Church initiated by Martin Luther which led to the development of Protestant churches.

A repeating musical section, generally also with repeated text; sometimes called a “chorus”.

The low, medium, and high sections of an instrument or vocal range.

The way the music is organized in respect to time.

Rhythm that follows the rhythm of the text and is not notated.

A term originally referring to music recorded by black musicians and intended for use by the African American community. The term has evolved throughout the years and encompasses several different musical styles, including soul, funk, and now contemporary R&B.

Repeated sections found in between the solo sections of a concerto grosso.

A style of music that grew out of Rhythm and Blues, and came into prominence during the 1950s. The style features a strong backbeat and often features electric guitar, bass, and drums. The style, now known as “rock,” has spawned many subgenres.

An instrumental form consisting of the alternation of a refrain “A” with contrasting sections (“B,” “C,” “D,” etc.). Rondos are often the final movements of string quartets, classical symphonies, concerti, and sonata (instrumental solos).

The momentary speeding up or slowing down of the tempo within a melody line, literally “robbing” time from one note to give to another.

A technique in which a clip of a preexisting song is isolated and looped, often as a background for a rapper.

A series of pitches, ordered by the interval between its notes.

19th-century operatic combination of a "scena" (a dramatic solo typically including a recitative) plus an aria; here the aria generally has two parts, a slower cantabile and a faster cabaletta.

A form that prominently replaced the minuet in symphonies and string quartets of the 19th century. Like the minuet, scherzos are in ternary form and in triple time, although they tend to be somewhat faster in tempo than the minuet.

The technique of improvising a rhythmic solo on one turntable over a beat.

A form of distinct sections that can be identified because of the changes in texture, or other musical elements and compositional techniques.

A repetition of a motive or phrase at a different pitch level.

Composing music using a series of values assigned to musical elements such as pitch, duration, dynamics, and instrumentation. Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique is one of the most important examples of serialism.

A chord that has four pitches stacked in intervals of thirds.

The simplest sound wave that occurs in nature. A pure sine wave contains no partials and is perfectly smooth and rounded in appearance on an oscilloscope.

A musical piece that features one musician either with or without accompaniment. In a larger scored piece, the solo is the main part that should be brought out while performing.

A composition for a solo instrument or an instrument with piano accompaniment, generally in three movements in fast, slow, and fast tempos, respectively.

A form often found in the first and last movements of sonatas, symphonies, and string quartets, consisting of three parts—exposition, development, and recapitulation.

A composition sung by voice(s).

A collection of art songs, unified by poet, narrative, musical style, or composer.

The mechanical movement of an audible pressure wave through a solid, liquid, or gas.

Tongitudinal waves (compression and rarefaction waves) that travel through a solid, liquid, or gas.

The distance between adjacent notes in a musical scale.

A performing ensemble consisting of two violinists, one violist, and one cellist that plays compositions called string quartets, generally in four movements.

Instruments whose sound is produced by setting strings in motion.

Section of a poem or lyric text generally of a set number of lines and line length. A text may have multiple strophes.

Musical form in which all verses or strophes of a song are sung to the same music.

A piece of music that sounds like a dance but is not designed for dancing. In other words, a stylized dance uses the distinct characteristics of a dance and would be recognized as a dance but might be too long or too complicated to dance to.

The main melody or tune of a fugue.

A multi-movement instrumental composition of baroque music—usually in dance form.

A term used to describe the rhythmic bounce that characterizes the jazz style. The term can also refer to the big band music of the 1930s and 1940s.

Music in which each syllable of a text is set to one musical note.

Program music in the form of a single-movement for orchestra; sometimes called a tone poem.

Multi-movement composition for orchestra, often in four movements.

The act of shifting the normal accent, usually by stressing the normally unaccented weak beats or placing the accent between the beats themselves.

Instruments that electronically generate a wide variety of sounds. They can also modify electronic or naturally produced recorded sounds.

The speed at which the beat is played.

A form of three parts, most often featuring two similar sections, separated by a contrasting section and represented by the letters A–B–A.

Distinct, abrupt changes in volume without gradual transitions.

The ways in which musical lines of a musical piece interact.

The presentation of a theme and then variations upon it. The theme may be illustrated as A, with any number of variations following it as A’, A’’, A’’’, A’’’’, etc.

Songs or musical compositions in which new music is composed for each stanza or section with no repetition.

The tone color or tone quality of a sound.

The numeric notation at the beginning of a line of music where the top number indicates how many beats are in each measure and the bottom number indicates which type of note will represent that beat.

The most important pitch of a key; the note from which the other pitches are derived.

A chord that has three pitches stacked in intervals of thirds.

Where the entire musical ensemble performs together as a whole.

A twelve-bar musical form commonly found in American music.

Compositional technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg that derives musical elements such as pitch, duration, dynamics, and instrumentation from a randomly produced series of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale (the 12-tone row).

A musical form (sometimes referred to as verse and chorus) in which one section of music is sung to all the verses and a different section of music is sung to the repeating refrain or chorus.

Having to do with the human voice.

A style of country music that developed in western cities and borrowed instruments from the dance band such as saxophones, trombones, trumpets, piano, bass, and drums.

Instruments traditionally made of wood whose sound is generated by forcing air through a tube, thus creating a vibrating air column.

Utilized by Renaissance composers to represent poetic images musically. For example, an ascending melodic line would portray the text “ascension to heaven.” Or a series of rapid notes would represent running.

A type of folk song devised to help groups of people perform physical work. The music usually uses the tempo of the work itself and was sung by lumberjacks, railroad workers, and prison chain gangs, among others.