| with Mr. Simmons
|
Vocabulary
A cappella. Unaccompanied choral singing.
Alla breve. The meter signature ¢ indicating the equivalent of ² ½ time.
Articulation. In performance, the characteristics of attack and decay of tones and the manner and extent to which tones in sequence are connected or disconnected.
Atonal. Music in which no single tone is the home base or key center.
Binary. A musical form consisting of two main sections.
Cadence. A group of notes or chords at the end of a phrase or piece of music that gives a feeling of pausing or finality.
Cadenza. A parenthetic flourish in a solo piece commonly just before a final or other important cadence.
Classroom instruments. Instruments typically used in the general music classroom, including, for example, recorder-type instruments, chorded zithers, mallet instruments, simple percussion instruments, fretted instruments, keyboard instruments, and electronic instruments.
Coda. A "tail" or short closing section added at the end of a piece of music.
Compound meter. Meter characterized by 3:1 relationship of the beat to the subdivided beat (the note receiving the beat in compound meter is always a dotted note.).
Diction. The use of pure and uniform vowel sounds and the execution of crisp and energetic consonants as appropriate for the musical style being sung.
Duple meter. The grouping of beats into sets of two.
Dynamic levels, dynamics. Degrees of loudness.
Elements of music. Pitch, rhythm, harmony, dynamics, timbre, texture, form.
Expression, expressive, expressively. With appropriate dynamics, phrasing, style, and interpretation and appropriate variations in dynamics and tempo.
Form. The overall structural organization of a music composition (e.g., AB, ABA, call and response, rondo, theme and variations, sonata-allegro) and the interrelationships of music events within the overall structure.
Genre. A type or category of music (e.g., sonata, opera, oratorio, art song, gospel, suite, jazz, madrigal, march, work song, lullaby, barbershop, Dixieland).