Performing arts: music
The music questions test the elements and terms of Western music, standard forms, and period style, usually by describing a work or asking which composer belongs to a movement.
Elements and texture
Melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, tempo, dynamics, and timbre are the basic elements. Texture is monophonic (one line), homophonic (melody plus chords), or polyphonic (independent simultaneous lines); imitative polyphony is counterpoint, as in a fugue, which has a subject, an answer, and a countersubject. Tonality organizes music around a key center, and modulation changes that center.
Forms to recognize
Sonata form: exposition with two contrasting themes, the second in a related key; development; recapitulation with both themes in the tonic. Other forms include theme and variations, rondo (ABACA), minuet and trio, and scherzo. Genres include symphony, concerto (with solo cadenza), string quartet, oratorio (unstaged, often sacred, as in Handel's Messiah), opera (aria, recitative, libretto), Lied, symphonic poem, and Wagner's leitmotif.
Period markers
Baroque (about 1600 to 1750): basso continuo, terraced dynamics, ornamentation, as in Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Monteverdi. Classical (about 1750 to 1820): balanced phrases, homophony, sonata form, as in Haydn, Mozart, early Beethoven. Romantic: expanded orchestra, expressive chromaticism, program music, as in Schubert, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Verdi. Twentieth century: Debussy's Impressionism, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913), Schoenberg's twelve-tone serialism, Copland, Gershwin, Cage. American vernacular styles include jazz (Ellington), the blues, and the Broadway musical.
Worked example
A described movement opens with a lyrical first theme in the tonic and a contrasting second theme in the dominant, develops fragments of both through distant keys, then returns with both themes in the tonic. Candidates may answer theme and variations because the themes recur. But the key contrast between the two themes and its resolution in the recapitulation define sonata form; variations would alter the theme's rhythm, harmony, or texture rather than restate it in structured keys.
Traps
- Placing Bach in the Classical era; he died in 1750, the conventional Baroque endpoint.
- Confusing oratorio with opera: oratorio is unstaged and often sacred.
- Mixing program music, which specifies a narrative or image, with absolute music.
- Confusing Schoenberg's serialism with Stravinsky's rhythm-driven primitivism.