Music 408 D

TERMS DISCUSSED IN CLASS

Summer 2017

• Additive rhythmic system or Bulgarian rhythms or Aksak rhythms
  Rhythmic system based on a fast pulse whose units are grouped in patterns of larger, uneven units (eg. 4+2+3) which are repeated. Bartok found this kind of rhythms first in the folklore of Bulgaria and named them Bulgarian Rhythms only to discover later that they are present all over South-Eastern Europe and in many other non-Western musical cultures. Aksak is the Turkish word denoting this kind of rhythms.

  Dada

  Artistic movement that started in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland. Considered by some to be an anarchic movement trying to negate the established conventions, it introdiced the use of chance or randomness in the artistic pursuits. Relatively shortly lived, it was the precursor of the surrealist movement in the 1920s, 1930s and beyond. Marcel Duchamp was to some extent a "sympatizer" who produced some of the first pieces of music composed using chance procedured. Duchamp had a major influence on the thinkinga of John Cage in the later part of the century.

  Divisionary system

  Rhythmic system used in Western music in which a larger duration is divided i(and sub-divided) into even parts.

  Expressionism

  Trend in the arts which seeks to depict the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist. Usually exaggerating such emotions and insisting on fantastic, violent, and sometimes shocking events.

  Fibonacci series of numbers; golden mean

  Series of numbers attributed to Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (died cca. 1250) in which the sum of any two adjacent numbers produces the next one in the series: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...... The ratio between two adjacent numbers of the series (eg. 8/13) is a close approximation of the golden mean ratio which is given by the expression: a/b = b/(a+b) = 0.6182... It was used extensively in architecture, painting and music since ancient Greece though Renaissance and by 20th. century artists. Composers such as Bartok, Debussy, Xenakis, etc. are known for the use of this device.

  Hauptstimme

  Main part/voice, used by Schoenberg and Berg

  Heterophony

  Musical texture in which two or more variants of the same melodic pattern are presented simultaneously.

  Impressionism

  Trend in the arts which seeks to suggest, to evoke subjective and sensory impressions or subtle moods rather then recreating an objective reality.

  Ison

  Greek term used in liturgical music: pedal tone or drone.

  Klabgfarbenmelodie

  Melody of colored sounds. Technique of orchestration introduced by Schoenberg (Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 16) and also exemplified by Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercar from the Musical Offering that assigns different sounds or groups of sounds of a melodic line to different instruments thus breaking, from the orchestration point of view, the continuity of that line.

  Modes with limited transpositions

  Term coined by Olivier Messiaen; refers to scales made out of repeating patterns of intervals which allow for only a limited (1-6) numbers of transpositions before repeating the original set of pitches.

  Nebenstimme

  Seconday part/voice used by Schoenberg and Berg.

  Nonretrogradable rhythm

  A rhythm which is the same when read/performed backward. Term often mentioned in connection with Olivier Messiaen's music and theories. A palindrome.

  Octatonic scale

  Scale with eight sounds per octave arranged in a pattern of alternating steps and half steps. Similar to some of Messiaen's modes with limited transpositions it was used extensively by some late 19th century composers (Rimsky Korsakov) or early 20th century composers, notably Stravinsky.

  Pentatonic scales

  Scales with five sounds per octave.

  Polychord

  An aggregate of two or more recognizable chords played simultaneously.

  Polyrhythms

  Superposition of two (or more) rhythmic patterns or meters

  Polytonality/Polymodality

  Superposition of two (or more) tonalities. Two or more streams of coherent progressions each in a different tonality (or in a different mode).

  Pre-pentatonic scales

  Scales with less than five sounds per octave.

  Sprechstimme/Sprechgesang

  Voal line that is half sung and half spoken, used by Schoenberg in Pierrot lunaire

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