Glossary:
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
A
accompaniment: the music that supports the melody. Accompaniment can be played on one or more instruments at once. Appalachian music: a style of folk music that developed in the Appalachian Mountain range in the southern United States. This music was first recorded (and made famous) by a fiddler named John Carson in the 1920s, but many people still play in this style today.
arrangement: when someone takes a piece of music and changes the instrumentation to create different musical colours. It is common for cellists to "take" music from the violin or voice repertoire and rewrite, or arrange, it for cello.
art music: also called serious music, this type of music is written to be enjoyed for its own sake, rather than as background to anything else. Because it exists to be art, composers of art music are usually more free to explore and try new things.
artistic discipline: any art that an artist chooses to spend a lot of time at. For example: visual art, music, theatre, or dance.
Top B
baroque: a time period in history that started in the early 1600s and lasted for about 150 years. Most music written in this time period has a similar style with clear harmonies and unique ornamentation. This style can be heard in the works of composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi and George Frideric Handel.
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C
compelling: when something encourages one's respect and admiration
composer's dates: the year of birth and the year of death of a composer.
conservatory: a place that focuses specifically on learning and teaching music.
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elegie: it literally means a poem mourning the loss of someone, but the term has been adopted in music to mean a piece with a similar character.
encore: literally means again (in French). An encore is a short piece that's played at the end of a concert when the audience enjoys the performance so much that it wants the show to continue! A performer can choose to play a piece that they already played, or choose another piece altogether. Sometimes more than one encore is requested.
Top G
genre: a unique style of music that is characterized by the rhythms, harmonies and structures that it uses. Examples of different genres of music are classical, baroque, folk, and jazz.
I
instrumentation: the instruments that are used in any given piece of music. For example, the instrumentation of a string quartet is two violins, one viola and one cello. In an orchestra, the instrumentation can change when different instruments rest and other come into the foreground.
interpretation: the way in which a musician takes the information presented and turns it into music.
Top K
key: what tells musicians the scale that is used for a piece. The key can change in the middle of a piece.
M
movement: a section of a larger musical work
O
opus: a numbering system that composes use to tell us which are the pieces of music that they consider to be finished pieces. It's good to look at opus numbers because they tell us where in the composer's development he or she wrote each piece.
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piece: a work that a composer has created. Sometimes they are pieces of larger works, or sometimes they exist on their own.
R
range: from the lowest note on an instrument to the highest note.
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S
set up: with cello, when we talk about "set up", it means the way in which the kind of pieces that are used and how they fit together. For example, in a Baroque set up, the neck has a different angle to the body, and the fingerboard is shorter than a modern cello. sonata: a musical form that changed throughout the baroque and classical musical eras. It started off as something that simply meant "played" rather than "sung" and turned into a very specific form with two main sections that are developed and then finally resolved at the end of the piece.
spokesman: someone who believes in something and tells people about it!
Top T
traditional: music that is played that follows things the way they were passed down to the musician
V
virtuoso: someone who has a strong command over his or her instrument. vocalise: a study for the voice that only uses vowel sounds (instead of words) so that the singer can focus totally on the melody
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