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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...

Dynamics (music) ... In music for marching band, passages louder than ƒƒƒ are sometimes colloquially referred to by descriptive terms such as "blastissimo"...

Musical Scale ... Western music See also: Musical mode Scales in traditional Western music generally consist of seven notes and repeat at the octave...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Consonance And Dissonance ... These may be summarized as simplicity. "A stable tone combination is a consonance; consonances are points of arrival, rest, and resolution." —Roger Kamien (2008), p.41 Dissonance "An unstable tone combination is a dissonance; its tension demands an onward motion to a stable chord...

Napster ... Its ease of use led to massive copyright violations of music and film media, as well as other intellectual property... History Although there were already networks that facilitated the distribution of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a user-friendly interface... The result was a robust system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download – at its peak there were 25 million users and 80 million songs, and the system never once crashed...

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"...

Schenkerian Analysis ... This reflects Schenker's belief that the deep, long–range structure of a piece of music has no particular rhythm... This long–range structure is called the Fundamental Structure (Ursatz) in Schenkerian analysis, while the more surface aspects of the music are called the foreground or surface layer... Although it is a subject of debate among music theorists whether there is a single correct hearing and analysis of a piece of tonal music, even those who hold that there is a unique correct analysis agree that the analysis can only be arrived at and evaluated subjectively by an expert listener...

Paleolithic Flutes ... They suggested music may have helped to maintain bonds between larger groups of humans, and that this may have helped the species to expand both in numbers and in geographical range...

MMCP – Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project ... Fostering the continued relevance of music to a student in school and contemporary society is a key purpose for MMCP in the areas of: Artistic Relevance – How can students recognize the aesthetic value of music? Personal Relevance – How can music satisfy the personal needs of students? Social Relevance – How can the changing nature of music in our society stay relevant to students as they grow older? MMCP believes presenting music as changing and evolving rather than “static” like western art music increases the interest in new creation... Rather, learning and acquisition of musical information are the byproduct of the “doing” in performing and creating the music... Attitudinal – Students excited about their own creative musical potential and their aesthetic sensitivity to music...