Music Appreciation Chapter 6-7-8-9-10

Continuo

(1) A set of chords continuously underlying the melody in a piece of Baroque music; (2) The instrument(s) playing the continuo, usually cello plus harpsichord.

Figured Bass

(Figured bass was an intricate system of shorthand composers used to show the keyboard players the chords intended to fill in the harmony of the piece. The purpose of this system is very much like a "lead-sheet" used by contemporary pop musicians. Lead sheets give the melody, the lyrics, and guitar chord symbols over the measure. No written-out piano part is included).

Estampie (Stamp your foot dance music)

A few-a very few-instrumental dances also survive from the same court circles that produced the chivalric trouvere repertory. Called Estampies, they are unassuming one-line pieces in which the same or similar musical phrases are repeated many times in varied forms. (This suggests that estampies may have been written-down jongleur improvisations.) Estampies are marked by lively and insistent rhythms in triple meter. Modern performers often add a touch of spice with the help of percussion instruments. This is a modest beginning to the long and important history of European dance music.

Jongleurs

A medieval secular musician.

Musical Imitation

A polyphonic musical texture in which the various melodic lines use approximately the same themes; as opposed to non-imitative polyphony.

Passacaglia

A set of variations on a short theme in the bass.

Troubadour

Aristocratic poet-musicians of the Middle Ages.

Trouveres

Aristocratic poet-musicians of the Middle Ages.

Bach & Vivaldi

Bach and Vivaldi excelled at an instrumental form called the Concerto Grosso. Although contemporary musicians would never name a piece of music "Grosso" because it is too close to our word "gross." But in the original Italian, a Concerto Grosso was simply a work for the small Baroque orchestra in which the melody would bounce back-and-forth between a small group and the full or "grosso" group.

Ventadorn

Bernart de Ventadorn(c. 1135-1194), Troubadour song, "La dousa vots". Bernart was one of the finest troubadour poets and probably the most important musically; other troubadour and trouvere songs imitated his. Originally of humble background, he came to serve the powerful Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II of England. Like hymns and olk songs, troubadour songs set all their stanzas to the same melody, resulting in what is called strophic form (A A A . . .); often each stanza is in (a a' b) form. "La dousa votz" is in the G (Mixolydian) mode. The language the troubadours spoke was Provencal, now almost extinct. It combines Old French and Old Spanish.

A cappela

Choral music or voices alone, without instruments.

Madrigal(English and Italian)

Definition: The main secular vocal genre of the Renaissance. English Madrigal: In 1601, twenty-three English composers contributed madrigals to a patriotic anthology in Elizabeth's honor, called "The triumphs of Oriana. All the poems end with the same refrain: "Then sang the shepherds and nymphs of Diana: Long live fair Oriana!" Oriana was a pseudonym for Elizabeth, and the nymphs and shepherds of Diana-the goddess of virginity-were her subjects. The Triumphs was obviously a court-inspired project, and as such it reminds us vividly of one of the main functions of court music in all ages: flattery. Italian Madrigal: It was in secular music, however, that the Renaissance ideal of music as expression made the greatest impact. This took place principally in an important new Italian genre, after around 1530, called the Madrigal. The madrigal is a short composition set to a one-stanza poem-typically a love poem, with a rapid turnover of ideas and images. Ideally it is sung by one singer per part, in an intimate setting. The music consists of a sometimes equally rapid turnover of sections in imitative polyphony or homophony. Essentially, then, the plan is the same as that in High Renaissance sacred works such as Masses and motets.

Drone

Drone is a single two-note chord running continuously. Drones are known from music around the world as well as from European folk music, and there is evidence that Drones were sometimes used to accompany plainchant. The drone, the mystical words of Hildegard's poem, and the free, surging melody work together to produce a feeling of serene yet intense spirituality.

Toccatas

Especially in Baroque music, a written-out composition in improvisational, style, generally for organ or harpsichord. Free-formed pieces meant to capture the spirit of Frescobaldi's own, improvisation, (Toccata means "touched" in Italian, as in the touching of keys.)

Reciting Tone

Especially in chant, the single note used for musical "recitation" with brief melodic formula for beginning and end.

Pope Marcellus Mass (Have a good definition in mind for the Pope Marcellus Mass).

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525-1594), Pope Marcellus Mass (1557) Palestrina was a singer in, or choirmaster of, many of Rome's famous churches and chapels, including the Sistine (Papal) Chapel. He lived in the repressive atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation movement, launched by the pope in 1545 to combat a growing revolt in northern Europe against Catholicism as then practiced. (That revolt was the Protestant Reformation.) In his youth Palestrina wrote secular compositions, some of which were widely popular, but later he recanted and apologized for them. He composed over a hundred Masses; some of the earliest of them were published with a highly symbolic illustration of the kneeling composer presenting his music to the pope. The Counter-Reformation staged just such a reform. Palestrina's most famous composition, the Pope Marcellus Mass, aws supposed to have convinced the pope and his council that composers of complicated polyphonic church music could still set the sacred words clearly enough that the Congregation could hear them. Partly because of this legend, and partly because of the serenity and careful control of his musical style, Palestrina became the most revered Renaissance composer for later centuries. His works are still treasured by Catholic choir directors today. Gloria; A section from Gloria of the Pope Marcellus Mass, the "Qui tollis," shows how the High Renaissance a cappella style changed after the time of Josquin. Compared with Josquin's setting of these same words in his "Pange Lingua Mass," Palestrina's setting. He uses a larger and richer choir than Josquin-six vocal parts, rather than four-and keeps alternating between one and another subgroup, or semichoir, drawn from the total choir. Thus the first phrase, in high voices,is answered by the second, in low voices and so on. The whole choir does not sing all together until the word "suscipe". What matters most to Palestrina are the rich, shifting tone colors and harmonies, which he uses to produce a generalized spiritual aura, sometimes etheral, sometimes ecstatic. And with the aims of the Counter-Reformation in mind, he is certainly careful to declaim the words very clearly.

Ground Bass

Ground Bass is music that is constructed from the bottom up. In ground-bass form, the bass instruments play a single short melody many times, generating the same set of repeated harmonies above it (played by the continuo chord instruments). Over this ground bass, upper instruments or voices play (or improvise) different melodies or virtuoso passages, all adjusted to the harmonies determined by the bass.

Stylized Dances

In the late Baroque, dance music such as the minuet and bouree', that had once been written for actual courtly dancing, now became stylized; in other words, meant for listening rather than dancing.

Johann Sebastian Bach

J.S Bach is one of the greatest geniuses in music history. But during his lifetime he never traveled far from his home in Germany and wasn't widely know in the rest of Europe. Bach was the first great Lutheran musician, and made his living as a church organist, teacher, and composer. Bach composed thousands of musical works in all the mediums of the Baroque, and created masterpieces in every genre. His Six Brandenburg Concerti, his keyboard work the "Well Tempered Klavier" and many others are highlights of this historic period. Even though Bach was one of the greatest musical geniuses in history, his wealthy employers treated him as a "craftsman" who created a product on demand. Bach had a large family, fathering over 20 children with two wives: one wife and then the second! Several of his sons became prominent composers in their own right later in the century.

Stylized dances

Less formal Renaissance dances include the Italian Saltarello; the Irish Jig, known also in Scotland and the north of England; and the French Bransle whose name is related to our word "Brawl." Usually formed in two phrases of each, one or both of them repeated to yield the pattern "A" "A" "B" or "A" "A" "B" "B". These dances are sometimes grouped together in small suites.

Word Painting

Musical illustration of the meaning of a word or a short verbal phrase.

Ornamentation

Not all melodies of the time are as complicated as the one shown above, however, and some, such as the simpler Baroque dances, are exceptions to the rule. On the other hand, the most highly prized skill of the elite musicians of the ear, opera singers, was improvising melodic extras in the arias they sang night after night in the theater. This practice is called Ornamentation. Definition: Addition of fast notes and vocal effects (such as trills) to a melody, making it more florid and expressive. Ornamentation is typically improvised in the music of all cultures, and in Western music is often written out.

Galliard

One of the most popular dances in the Renaissance era was the Pavan, a solemn dance in duple meter; with participants stepping and stopping formally. It was usually paired with Galliard-a Renaissance court dance in triple meter.

Opera

Opera-drama presented in music, with the characters singing instead of speaking-is often called the most characteristic art form of the Baroque period. Baroque Opera combined many different arts; not only music, drama, and poetry but also dancing, highly elaborate scene design, and spectacular special effects.

Minnesingers

Poet-Composers of the Middle Ages in Germany.

Aria & Recitative (Important forms of singing in opera)

Recitative, from the Italian word for "recitation," is the technique of declaiming words musically in a heightened, theatrical manner. It is descended from the careful declamation practiced by late Renaissance composers. The singing voice closely follows the free rhythm of highly emotional speech; it mirrors and exaggerates the natural ups and downs that occur as an actor raises his or her voice at a question, lowers it in an aside, or cries out minimum-most often one or two continuo instruments-ensuring that all the words can be heard clearly. Recitative is used for plot action, dialogue, and other situations in the drama where it is particularly important for the words to be brought out. On the other hand, where spoken drama would call for soliloquies or meditations, opera uses arias. An Aria is an extended piece for solo singer that has much more musical elaboration and coherence than a passage of recitative. The vocal part is more melodic, the rhythm is more consistent, the meter clearer, and typically accompaniment includes the entire orchestra. Recitative required great singing actors, and arias required artists who could convert notes of a score into these tableaus of furious, sensuous, or tragic emotion. Opera houses in the seventeenth century became showcases of vocal virtuosity-as they still are today. Ever since the Baroque era, dramatic expression and vocal display have vied with one another as the driving forces of opera.

Basso Continuo

Some early Baroque music is homophonic and some is ployphonic, but both textures are enriched by a feature unique to the period, the Basso Continuo. In Baroque music the bass line is performed by bass voices (as in Renaissance music) or low instruments such as cellos or bassoons. But the bass part in Baroque music is also played by an organ, harpsichord, or other chord instrument. This instrument not only reinforces the bass line but also adds chords continuously to go with it. The Basso Continuo, as it was called, meaning "continuous bass," has the double effect of clarifying the harmony and making the texture bind or jell. Baroque music players today usually call it simply the Continuo.

Baroque Orchestra Size

The core of the Baroque orchestra was a group of instruments of the violin family. The famous orchestra maintained by Louis XIV of France was called "Twenty-Four Violins of the King"-meaning twenty-four instruments of the violin family: Six violins, twelve violas, cellos, and six cellos. A great deal of Baroque music was written for such an orchestra or a similar one that today, would be called a "String orchestra": violins, violas, cellos, and one or two basses. To this was added a keyboard instrument as continuo-usually a harpsichord in secular music and an organ in church music. THE BAROQUE ORCHESTRA Vivaldi's concerto in "G": Violins(divided into two groups called violins 1, and violins 2), Violas, Cellos, Bass(playing the same music as the Cellos an octave lower), Harpsichord or Organ. THE FESTIVE BAROQUE ORCHESTRA Handel's Minuet from "The Royal Fireworks Music" Violins 1, Violins 2, Violas, Cellos, Bass, two Oboes, 1 Bassoon, three Trumpets, two Timpani(kettledrums), Harpsichord or Organ.

Mass

The main Roman Catholic service; or the music written for it. The musical Mass consists of five large sections: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.

Medieval Modes

The original scale of western music was the diatonic scale, equivalent to the "white-note" scale on piano. We still use this scale today, centered on "C", the music is said to be in the major mode, or "A" as the home pitch, or tonic. Oriented around "C" the music is said to be in the major mode, oriented around "A", in the minor mode. Musicians of the Middle Ages organized the scale differently-not around "C" or "A", but around "D", "E","F", or "G". The result was music in other modes, different from the modern major or minor. These modes were given Greek names, since medieval scholars traced them back to the modes of ancient Greek music, as discussed by Plato and others. The medieval modes are these: Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian. The essential difference between the modern major and minor modes comes in the different arrangement of half steps and whole steps in their scales. The medieval modes provides four additional arrangements. So medieval tunes sound different from modern tunes; and since there are more possible arrangements, medieval plainchant is actually richer and more subtle than music in the major/minor system. The artistic effect of plainchant-music without harmony or definite rhythm-is concentrated in melody built on this rich modal system.

Typical Note

The procedure used for a Concerto Grosso and Solo Concerto, was for the orchestra to play the main melody and the small group or soloist to perform flashier or more elaborate material, with a return to the more stable opening theme. This form became known as Ritornello form. In Italian, the term Ritornello means "return," and the main theme returns often to give unity to the form. Concerto Grossi (plural for Grosso) were in three sections known as movements similar to the three acts of a play.

Gregorian Chant

The type of chant used in the Early Roman Cathlic church.

Hildegard of Bigen

To the Catholic Church she is St. Hildegard, venerated by a special liturgy on September 17. To musicians she is the first great woman composer. Five hundred years after Gregory I, the first compiler of Gregorian chants, Hildegard composed plainchant melodies in her own highly individual style, to go with poems that she wrote for special services at the convent of Bigen, in western Germany, under her charge as abbess. She also wrote a famous book describing her religious visions, books on natural science and medicine, even biographies.

Plainchant (Plainsong)

Unaccompanied, monophonic music, without fixed rhythm or meter, such as Gregorian Chant.

Antonio Vivaldi

Vivaldi was known as "The Red Priest" due to his wearing bright red vestments during church services.

Kemp's Jig.

Will Kemp was an Elizabethan actor, comedian, and song-and-dance man, immortalized for having created comic roles in Shakespeare, such as Dogberry, the addle-headed constable in "Much Ado about Nothing." Kemp specialized in a type of popular dance number, called a jig, that was regularly presented in Elizabethan theaters after the main play. He accompanied himself with a pipe (a type of simple flute, blown like a recorder) and tabor (a snare drum). "Kemp's jig" is a lively-perhaps perky is the right word- and very simple dance tune in "A" "A" "B" form. Both "A" and "B" end with the same cadence.