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In instrumental music, a style of playing that imitates the way the human voice might express the music, with a measured tempo and flexible legato. cantilena a vocal melody or instrumental passage in a smooth, lyrical style canto Chorus; choral; chant cantus mensuratus or cantus figuratus (Lat.) Meaning respectively "measured song" or "figured ...
Hymn tune descants are counter-melodies, generally at a higher pitch than the main melody. Typically they are sung in the final or penultimate verse of a hymn. [9]Although the English Hymnal of 1906 did not include descants, this influential hymnal, whose music editor was Ralph Vaughan Williams, served as a source of tunes for which the earliest known hymn tune descants were published.
Musical symbols are marks and symbols in musical notation that indicate various aspects of how a piece of music is to be performed. There are symbols to communicate information about many musical elements, including pitch, duration, dynamics, or articulation of musical notes; tempo, metre, form (e.g., whether sections are repeated), and details about specific playing techniques (e.g., which ...
The term "historicism" has acquired various, sometimes confusing meanings over a wide range of disciplines. The British philosopher Karl Popper, who disliked modern music and strongly preferred the works of Bach, Mozart, and Schubert, spoke of "the failure of the historicist propaganda for the modern in music."
In Western classical music, obbligato (Italian pronunciation: [obbliˈɡaːto], also spelled obligato [1]) usually describes a musical line that is in some way indispensable in performance. Its opposite is the marking ad libitum. It can also be used, more specifically, to indicate that a passage of music was to be played exactly as written, or ...
Musical phrasing is the method by which a musician shapes a sequence of notes in a passage of music to allow expression, much like when speaking English a phrase may be written identically but may be spoken differently, and is named for the interpretation of small units of time known as phrases (half of a period).
Music history, sometimes called historical musicology, is a highly diverse subfield of the broader discipline of musicology that studies music from a historical ...
Neotonality (or neocentricity) is an inclusive term referring to musical compositions of the twentieth century in which the tonality of the common-practice period (i.e. functional harmony and tonic-dominant relationships) is replaced by one or several nontraditional tonal conceptions, such as tonal assertion or contrapuntal motion around a central chord.