Early Music ... However, today this term has come to include "any music for which a historically appropriate style of performance must be reconstructed on the basis of surviving scores, treatises, instruments and other contemporary evidence." Revival Performance practice According to Margaret Bent, "Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness...
Progressive Rock ... The Oxford Companion to Music states that progressive rock bands ".explored extended musical structures which involved intricate instrumental patterns and textures and often esoteric subject matter." Additionally, the arrangements often incorporated elements drawn from classical, jazz, and later world music... Progressive rock bands sometimes used "concept albums that made unified statements, usually telling an epic story or tackling a grand overarching theme." Progressive rock developed from late 1960s psychedelic rock, as part of a wide-ranging tendency in rock music of this era to draw inspiration from ever more diverse influences... The term was initially applied to the music of British bands such as Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, reaching its peak of popularity in the mid 1970s...
Bluegrass Music ... Immigrants from England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland arrived in Appalachia in the 18th (and in some cases 17th) century, and brought with them the musical traditions of these countries. These traditions consisted primarily of English and Scottish ballads— which were essentially unaccompanied narratives— and dance music, such as Irish reels, which were accompanied by a fiddle...
Music Of China ... According to Mencius, a powerful ruler once asked him whether it was moral if he preferred popular music to the classics... The Imperial Music Bureau, first established in the Qin Dynasty (221–07 BC), was greatly expanded under the Emperor Han Wu Di (140–87 BC) and charged with supervising court music and military music and determining what folk music would be officially recognized... In subsequent dynasties, the development of Chinese music was strongly influenced by foreign music, especially Central Asia...
Musical Analysis ... The principle of analysis has been variously criticized, especially by composers, such as Edgard Varèse's claim that, “to explain by means of is to decompose, to mutilate the spirit of a work” (quoted in Bernard 1981, 1). Analyses Some analysts, such as Donald Francis Tovey (whose Essays in Musical Analysis are among the most accessible musical analyses) have presented their analyses in prose...
Country Music ... The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to the earlier term hillbilly music... In 2009 Country music was the most listened to rush hour radio genre during the evening commute, and second most popular in the morning commute... Early history Immigrants to the Maritime Provinces and Southern Appalachian Mountains of North America brought the music and instruments of the Old World along with them for nearly 300 years...
Ear Training ... Many musicians use functional pitch recognition in order to identify, understand, and appreciate the roles and meanings of pitches within a key. To this end, scale-degree numbers or movable-do solmization (do, re, mi, etc.) can be quite helpful...
Texture (music) ... Common types In musical terms, particularly in the fields of music history and music analysis, some common terms for different types of texture are: Type Description Visual Audio Monophonic Monophonic texture includes a single melodic line with no accompaniment... Characteristic texture of the Classical period and continued to predominate in Romantic music while in the 20th century, "popular music is nearly all homophonic," and, "much of jazz is also" though, "the simultaneous improvisations of some jazz musicians creates a true polyphony" (Benward & Saker 2003, 136)... Additive A texture most commonly found in rock music that starts off mono or homophonic, and gradually changes and builds up to polyphonic...
Musical Notation ... Byzantine music uses the eight natural, non-tempered scales called Ēkhoi, "sounds", exclusively, and therefore the absolute pitch of each note may slightly vary each time, depending on the particular Ēkhos used... Early Europe Scholar and music theorist Isidore of Seville, writing in the early 7th century, remarked in this Etymologiae that it was impossible to notate music... The problem with this notation was that it only showed melodic contours and consequently the music could not be read by someone who did not know the music already...
Four-part Harmony ... A special genre in this music is the "barbershop quartet" usually consisting of 4 men who sing tenor, countertenor, baritone, and bass parts... Four parts for instruments Some music is written, in four-part harmony, for small groups of only 4 instruments, such as a string quartet, a brass quartet, or a woodwind quartet (might include a French horn)... However, due to the range of musical instruments covering more pitches than a typical human voice, a quartet might play some harmonies with very high notes or very low notes, rather than the blended range of choral music...
Music And Mathematics ... The attempt to structure and communicate new ways of composing and hearing music has led to musical applications of set theory, abstract algebra and number theory... Time, rhythm and meter Without the boundaries of rhythmic structure – a fundamental equal and regular arrangement of pulse repetitivity, accent, phrase and duration – music would be impossible... The common types of form known as binary and ternary ("twofold" and "threefold") once again demonstrate the importance of small integral values to the intelligibility and appeal of music...
Renaissance Music ... Demand for music as entertainment and as an activity for educated amateurs increased with the emergence of a bourgeois class... Relative political stability and prosperity in the Low Countries, along with a flourishing system of music education in the area's many churches and cathedrals, allowed the training of hundreds of singers and composers... Opera arose at this time in Florence as a deliberate attempt to resurrect the music of ancient Greece...
Music Of Greece ... Music was an important part of education in ancient Greece, and boys were taught music starting at age six... Greek musical literacy created a flowering of development; Greek music theory included the Greek musical modes, eventually became the basis for Western religious music and classical music... Greece in the Roman Empire See also: Music of ancient Rome Due to Rome's reverence for Greek culture, the Romans borrowed the Greek method of 'enchiriadic notation' (marks which indicated the general shape of the tune but not the exact notes or rhythms) to record their music, if they used any notation at all...
Pitch (music) ... Pitch may be quantified as a frequency, but pitch is not a purely objective physical property; it is a subjective psychoacoustical attribute of sound. Historically, the study of pitch and pitch perception has been a central problem in psychoacoustics, and has been instrumental in forming and testing theories of sound representation, processing, and perception in the auditory system...
Rock And Roll ... The American Heritage Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary both define rock and roll as synonymous with rock music... Encyclopædia Britannica, on the other hand, regards it as the music that originated in the mid-1950s and later developed "into the more encompassing international style known as rock music"...
20th-century Music ... Electronic music For centuries, instrumental music had either been created by singing, drawing a bow across or plucking taught gut or metal strings (string instruments), constricting vibrating air (woodwinds and brass) or hitting or stroking something (percussion)...
Alternative Rock ... Alternative rock is a broad umbrella term consisting of music that differs greatly in terms of its sound, its social context, and its regional roots... But most alternative bands' commercial success was limited in comparison to other genres of rock and pop music at the time, and most acts remained signed to independent labels and received relatively little attention from mainstream radio, television or newspapers... The term alternative rock Before the term alternative rock came into common usage around 1990, the sort of music to which it refers was known by a variety of terms...
Romantic Music ... Romantic music as a movement evolved from the formats, genres and musical ideas established in earlier periods, such as the classical period, and went further in the name of expression and syncretism of different art-forms with music... Romanticism does not necessarily refer to romantic love, though that theme was prevalent in many works composed during this time period, both in literature, painting, or music... Romantic music attempted to increase emotional expression and power to describe deeper truths or human feelings, while preserving but in many cases extending the formal structures from the classical period, in others, creating new forms that were deemed better suited to the new subject matter...
Classical Music ... European music is largely distinguished from many other non-European and popular musical forms by its system of staff notation, in use since about the 16th century... Western staff notation is used by composers to prescribe to the performer the pitch, speed, meter, individual rhythms and exact execution of a piece of music... This leaves less room for practices such as improvisation and ad libitum ornamentation, that are frequently heard in non-European art music and popular music...
Blues ... World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners... Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition... Form The blues form is a cyclic musical form in which repeating progression of chords mirrors the call and response scheme commonly found in African and African-American music...