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accent: An emphasis on a particular note or musical gesture.
added-sixth chord: A triad with an additional note attached, a major sixth above the tonic note. For example, a C-major triad plus the note A:
This chord is often associated with a certain kitschy, cocktail-lounge sweetness, although Messiaen lends it a divine tinge in "Chant d'amour 2" from the Turangalîla-Symphonie —
Riccardo Chailly conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca 436626.
— and Kurt Weill gives it a bitter taste in “Mack the Knife”:
Bertolt Brecht singing; from the album Die Dreigroschenoper, Berlin 1930, Teldec 0927 42663 2.
Aeolian mode: See mode.
arpeggio: A chord that is spelled out note by note. Philip Glass makes heavy use of steady streams of arpeggios:
"Bed" Aria from Einstein on the Beach, Nonesuch 79323.
atonal, atonality: Harmony characterized by the absence of key and by an avoidance of standard tonal chords. From Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, No. 4:
James Levine conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, DG 419781.
augmented chord: A chord changed by the widening of an outer interval. For example, an augmented triad is a major triad whose the uppermost note has gone up a semitone:
“Augurs” chord: The dissonant chord that sounds some two hundred times in "The Augurs of Spring," the second section of Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary 1913 ballet score Rite of Spring. It consists of two clashing tonal components, an F-flat-major triad and an E-flat dominant seventh (defined below):
Here it is in the full orchestra:
Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the LA Philharmonic, DG 00289 477 6198.
bar: See measure.
Baroque: Musical era that is generally considered to have lasted from about 1600 to about 1750. Major Baroque composers include the later Monteverdi, J. S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, and Purcell. The period saw the first great flourishing of opera, the development of instrumental forms such as the sonata and the concerto, and the golden age of counterpoint (see below).
beat: The basic pulse of music: one, two, three, four.... In acoustics, "beat" has a somewhat different meaning. When two slightly different frequencies sound together, the ear picks up a fluctuation of volume caused by the interference of the two waves. This sensation of a "beat" explains why the semitone interval is generally perceived as harsh:
black keys: The black keys on a piano produce only sharp and flat notes—i. e., those outside the C-major scale.
blues scale, blue notes: In the African-American blues tradition, singers and players regularly bend down or flatten certain notes of the standard diatonic scale, especially the third, fifth, and seventh notes. Follow this link to a useful podcast about the blues scale.
C major: The bright, fundamental key that uses only the white keys on a piano. Here is the major scale beginning on C:
cadence: In traditional harmony, a sequence of notes or chords at the end of a passage that gives the feeling of an arrival, of coming to rest.
canon: A form of counterpoint or polyphony in which different voices draw on the same melody one after another, sometimes exactly following the original ("strict" canon) and sometimes treating it more freely. The voices may also render the melody upside down or backwards. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is a classic canon; so is “Frère Jacques,” which appears in the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony:
Leonard Bernstein conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra, DG 459 080-2.
Twentieth-century composers have used the canon in various idiosyncratic ways: see György Ligeti’s micropolyphony and Steve Reich’s phasing music.
chorale: The hymn of the Protestant Church in Germany. Bach’s chorales had a haunting effect on twentieth-century music—most notably in the second movement of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, which uses the chorale “Es ist genug":
Anne-Sophie Mutter, with James Levine conducting the Chicago Symphony; DG 000205102.
chord: Several notes sounding together.
chord of resonance: Messiaen’s term for a chord made up of pitches related to the natural harmonic series:
chromatic scale, chromatic harmony, chromaticism: The chromatic scale consists of successive rising intervals of the semitone — the smallest space between notes in conventional Western music. If you start on middle C on the piano and play consecutive keys—both black and white—until you reach the next highest C, you will produce a chromatic scale:
Chromatic harmony or chromaticism is associated with the later stages of Romantic music and the onset of atonality: composers felt increasingly free to bring most or all of the twelve chromatic notes into play, bending or abandoning the rules of tonal harmony.
classical, Classical: For better or worse, the term "classical music" is now understood to mean all music of the “composed” or “notated” type from the medieval period to the present. With a capital C, it also refers to music from the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth, particularly the work of Haydn, Mozart, and the younger Beethoven.
cluster chord or cluster: A chord in which several adjacent notes sound together in a pungent dissonance. In the early twentieth century, Leo Ornstein, Henry Cowell, Bartók, and Charles Ives had pianists play clusters with the side of the hand, the palm, the fist, the forearm, or a stick of wood. In postwar avant-garde works by Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, and others, cluster chords are produced by instruments spread through all registers, creating an amorphous cloud of sound. From Cowell's The Tides of Manaunaun:
Henry Cowell, piano; Smithsonian Folkways SFW40801.
Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima:
The composer conducting the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, EMI 65077.
counterpoint, contrapuntal: Music in which multiple lines sound simultaneously, their movement governed by various rules devised in the Renaissance and Baroque. Twentieth-century composers have often applied contrapuntal rules to modern harmony, as in Schoenberg’s method of twelve-tone composition. See also canon (above) and fugue.
crescendo: An increase of volume. It can happen quickly, as when a performer plays a single note and makes it suddenly louder, or it can happen gradually, as when volume increases incrementally over many bars. From Act III of Berg's Wozzeck:
Claudio Abbado conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, DG 423587.
A decrease in volume is called a decrescendo or diminuendo.
Darmstadt: In 1946 the German city of Darmstadt began hosting the International Summer Courses for New Music, which became one of the major gathering-places for the postwar avant-garde. "Darmstadt" or "Darmstadt school" is often used as shorthand for a fiery group of young composers that included Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, and Pierre Boulez; the term also suggests an array of avant-garde techniques, beginning with total serialism. For audio samples, see Chapter 11 and Chapter 13 of the Audio Guide.
diatonic: A family of seven-note scales that includes the familiar major and minor scales and also various old church modes.
diminished seventh chord: To "diminish" an interval is to narrow it by a semitone — the smallest interval in conventional Western music. The diminished seventh chord is a four-note chord spanning the interval of the diminished seventh (equivalent to a major sixth), in which each note is separated from the next by the interval of a minor third:
The chord can resolve in any number of directions, and was prized by Romantic composers for its versatility, its ambiguity, and, in dramatic contexts, its somewhat dark, threatening sound. In Mozart's Don Giovanni, the animated stone statue of the Commendatore enters on a diminished seventh:
Gottlob Frick, with Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra; EMI 67873.
dodecaphony, dodecaphonic: Terms interchangeable with twelve-tone composition.
dominant, tonic: The tonic is the root note of a scale. The tonic triad is a chord built on that note; for example, the C-major triad in the key of C. The close companion of the tonic triad is the dominant, based on the fifth note of the scale; in conventional tonality, it often leads back to the tonic, in a progression is called dominant-tonic (or V-I).The first phrase of "Happy Birthday" goes from tonic to dominant, the second returns to the tonic. A dominant seventh chord is a dominant triad with an additional note attached. That extra note is separated from the root note by the interval of a minor seventh. Here's a dominant seventh chord on G (consisting of the notes G, B, D, and F), followed by a resolution to C major:
To take Don Giovanni as an example again, the first chord accompanying the Commendatore's entrance is a diminished seventh, while the second chord is an A dominant seventh, resolving to the tonic of D minor when the singer enters:
Gottlob Frick, with Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra; EMI 67873.
dynamics: Directions in a score for relative levels of soft and loud. The standard dynamic markings are pp (pianissimo, very soft), p (piano, soft), mp (mezzo piano, somewhat soft), mf (mezzo forte, somewhat loud), f (forte, loud), ff (fortissimo, very loud). Further extremes are indicated by ppp, fff, pppp, ffff, and so on.
