Music Definitions: A Comprehensive List
Music Definitions
Here are some definitions of musical terms:
- Aria – A long, accompanied song for a solo voice, typically in an opera or oratorio.
- Art Song (Lied) – A song written to be sung in recital, typically with piano accompaniment and often set to a poem.
- Atonality – Not written in any key or mode.
- Basso Continuo – (In baroque music) An accompanying part that includes a bass line and harmonies, typically played on a keyboard instrument and with other instruments such as cello or bass viol.
- Cadenza – A virtuoso solo passage inserted into a movement in a concerto or other work, typically near the end.
- Chance/Aleatoric Music – Relating to or denoting random choice during their composition, production, or performance.
- Character Piece – A relatively short work, usually for piano solo that captures a particular mood.
- Chorale – A musical composition (or part of one) consisting of or resembling a harmonized version of a simple, stately hymn tune.
- Concerto – A musical composition for a solo instrument or instruments accompanied by an orchestra.
- Cyclic Form – A form in which individual movements are linked in some tangible and distinctive way, usually through the use of a common musical idea.
- Ethnomusicology – The study of the music of different cultures, especially non-Western ones.
- Etude – A short musical composition, typically for one instrument, designed as an exercise to improve the technique or demonstrate the skill of the player.
- Expressionism – A style of painting, music, or drama in which the artist or writer seeks to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the external world.
- Harpsichord – Similar to piano but strings are plucked not hammered.
- Idee Fixe – An idea or desire that dominates the mind; an obsession.
- Impressionism – Music a style of composition (associated especially with Debussy) in which clarity of structure and theme is subordinate to harmonic effects, characteristically using the whole-tone scale.
- Leitmotif – A recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation.
- Libretto – The text of an opera or other long vocal work.
- Mass – The Christian church thing.
- Modernist – A believer in or supporter of modernism, especially in the arts.
- Music Drama – An opera whose structure is governed by considerations of dramatic effectiveness, rather than by the convention of having a series of formal arias.
- Nationalism – Being patriotic.
- Neoclassicism – The revival of a classical style or treatment in art, literature, architecture, or music.
- Opera – Acted out play musically with costumes and stage.
- Oratorio – Opera without costumes, based on sacred texts.
- Program Music – Music that is intended to evoke images or convey the impression of events.
- Program Symphony – (Think same idea but with a symphony – look up).
- Recitative – Musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and the dialogue parts of opera and oratorio, sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech with many words on the same note.
- Ritornello Form – Italian for “little return.” Name for the statement and the return of the full ensemble. In a work alternating between orchestra and soloist.
- Serialism – A writing style where notes are not drawn from a scale, but from predetermined series of notes. (20th century)
- Sonata Form – A work that is played as opposed to sung.
- Strophic Form – A structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line-length.
- Thematic Transformation – Is a technique of where a leitmotif, or theme, is developed by changing the theme by using Permutation (Transposition or Modulation, Inversion), Augmentation, and Fragmentation.
- Through-Composed Form – A form in which each section has its own music, with very little or no repetition between sections.
- Tone Poem – A piece of orchestral music, typically in one movement, on a descriptive or rhapsodic theme.
- Tone Row – A particular sequence of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale used as a basis for twelve-tone (serial) music.
- Virtuoso – A person highly skilled in music.
- Word Painting – Music that imitates, describes, or conjures images of the text being sung.