Musical Textures and History: From Gregorian Chants to Renaissance Composers
Musical Textures: Monody, Polyphony, and Homophony
Monody: The simplest texture, featuring a single melodic line without accompaniment.
Polyphony: This texture results from the simultaneous combination of two or more melodies.
Homophony or Chordal Texture: Music is developed vertically, meaning the voices are aligned. The four notes of the chord are distributed among the four voices, which have the same rhythm. The text becomes comprehensible to the listener because all voices simultaneously sing the
Read MoreRadio: History, Evolution, and Impact on Music
Radio
Etymology: From Latin radius, meaning “ray of light.” In the eighteenth century, it was applied to the radiation (emission) of the element radium.
In 1888, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz discovered radio waves. Hertz also gave his name to the physical unit of vibrations per second (Hertz), which determines the pitch of sounds and the wavelength. Between 1895 and 1896, the Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi developed a method for producing and receiving electromagnetic waves. In 1898, he
Read More20th Century Music: Impressionism to Electroacoustic
Features of Impressionism
Melodies without clear lines and cadences, which use modal, pentatonic, chromatic, and whole-tone scales. Harmony is free, with chords valued for their sound and not by tonal function. A new concept of using the instrument’s timbre individually and not as an orchestral set. Sound created an atmosphere based on “impressions” of hearing that has as its object the pleasure of sound.
Features of Expressionism
- Search for the dramatic through the continuous use of dissonances that
Neoclassical and Romantic Painting: Styles and Characteristics
Neoclassical Painting
The Neoclassical reaction presumed the mid-eighteenth-century classical breakup of the former regime. The art forms revived the noble forms of the Greco-Roman past. The theorist and painter Anton Raphael Mengs’ Neoclassical theories would lead to a painting on the roof of one of the rooms in the Villa Albani in Rome that might be considered a manifesto of this new-born classicism. In his Parnassus, he renounced the colorful effects or own Baroque composition for a painting in
Read MoreRococo to Romanticism: Evolution of Western Music
Rococo: General Features (1700-1755)
The Rococo, refining the art of the room of Louis XV, was dominant throughout the first half of the eighteenth century in France. France, in the first half of the eighteenth century, was the intellectual and moral beacon that guided all of Europe. Its palace of Versailles and its academies were imitated across Europe.
The Rococo is essentially a decorative and ornamental style. It is distinguished by the abundant use of rocks and shells in irregular, asymmetrical
Read MoreMusical Analysis of Wagner’s Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde
Musical Analysis of Wagner’s *Liebestod* from *Tristan and Isolde*
Rhythm
The piece is in a regular rhythm, binary, with a 4/4 time signature (four beats per measure, with the quarter note as the unit). However, the alternating strong and weak accents that characterized Classical and early Romantic music are less evident here. Rhythmic regularity is not abandoned, but Wagner relegates it to the background, making it only faintly perceptible. This lack of a sharp distinction between strong and weak
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