Music History Terms

Front 1

Avant-Garde

Back 1

French term 'vanguard', the first troops to engage the enemy in battle. It conjures the image of a small faced of artist waging war against the conservative tastes of resistant audience

Front 2

voiles

Back 2

illustrates the increasing use of nontraditional scale forms in the aryl decades of the 20th century

Front 3

whole-tone scales

Back 3

based on 6 notes, each a whole tone apart

Front 4

pentatonic scales

Back 4

based on five notes, associated with east asia music

Front 5

ocatonic scales

Back 5

alternates between half and whole steps and contains within itself all possible intervals

Front 6

Tetrachords

Back 6

four note units that together make up the ocatonic scale.

Front 7

Quartal hormonies

Back 7

chords built on the interval of a fourth rather than a third. Charles Ives used them

Front 8

atonality

Back 8

the absence of a tonal center

Front 9

serial composition

Back 9

technique developed by Schoenberg in the early 1920s. Based on the premise that an established unit of music, most often a row, or series, of 12 different pitches- can be varied repeatedly in such a way as to provide the structural basis for an entire work

Front 10

Dodecaphony

Back 10

twelve tone serial compostion, uses as its basic unity a row of 12 different pitches drawn from the 12 pitches of the chromatic octave

Front 11

Prime

Back 11

the basic form of the row

Front 12

inversion

Back 12

the row played upside down: a rise of a major third in the prime form on the row becomes a fall of a major third; a fall of a minor second in the prime form becomes a rise of a minor second, and so on.

Front 13

retrograde

Back 13

the row played backward, beginning with the last note and ending with the first

Front 14

retrograde inversion

Back 14

the inverted form of the row played backward

Front 15

matrix

Back 15

shows at a glance all the 48 possibilities of this row in the transposed versions o p, i, r, and ri

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pithc class

Back 16

each form of the row begins is designated by a number

Front 17

social realism

Back 17

a readily accessible style that evokes the music of the people an overwhelmingly optimist tone

Front 18

revue

Back 18

a successor to music gall and vaudeville perofmrances in which a potpourri of acts these shows

Front 19

mictrotones

Back 19

intervals smaller than a half step

Front 20

combinatorial

Back 20

one of the rows hexachords its first six or last six notes, commonly referred to as hexachords A and B- can be combined with one of the hexachords of an inverted, retrograde, or retrograde inverted form of the same row without producing any duplication of pithces

Front 21

integral serialism/ total serialism

Back 21

extending the parameters of serial composition beyond pitch to include such elements as rhythm and dynamics

Front 22

aleatory music

Back 22

term comes form the latin alea meaning 'die' and music involves a 'roll of the dice' that is chance. the idea of writing music by chance, even by a literal throw of the dice, was by no means new in the 20th C

Front 23

poltonality

Back 23

simultaneous juxtaposition of contrasting triads or keys

Front 24

Gebrauchsmusik

Back 24

used by hindimith 'music of ruse' challenge to concept of musical autonomy. pedagogical music and works for amateurs

Front 25

The I Ching

Back 25

an ancient chinese text used for divination. cage used the text to make every msucial decision. cage associated decisions with different symbols in the system, deterring the symbol using coin tossing.