The Stars and Superstars of Spanish Flamenco Guitar 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Persian Traditional Music ... Iranian classical music continues to function as a spiritual tool as it has throughout its history, and much less of a recreational activity... The Radif of Iranian music * Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity Country Iran Reference 279 Region ** Asia and Australasia Inscription history Inscription 2009 * Name as inscribed by UNESCO ** Region as classified by UNESCO The Radif:...

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...

Timbre ... In simple terms, timbre is what makes a particular musical sound different from another, even when they have the same pitch and loudness. For instance, it is the difference between a guitar and a piano playing the same note at the same loudness...

Kodály Method ... Beginning in 1935, along with his colleague Jenő Ádám, he embarked on a long term project to reform music teaching in the lower and middle schools by actively creating a new curriculum and new teaching methods, as well as writing new musical compositions for children... The school was so successful that over one hundred music primary schools opened within the next decade (Eösze 1962:79)... After about fifteen years approximately 50% of the schools in Hungary were music schools (Russell-Smith 1967:44)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Rhythm ... Anthropology In his series How Music Works, Howard Goodall presents theories that human rhythm recalls the regularity with which we walk and the heartbeat we heard in the womb... London writes that musical metre "involves our initial perception as well as subsequent anticipation of a series of beats that we abstract from the rhythm surface of the music as it unfolds in time" (London 2004, 4)...

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...