Balearic PAU Music & Dance flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Organum

Medieval polyphony in which one or more voices are added to a plainchant melody; early forms are parallel (organum purum), later Notre Dame organum by Léonin and Pérotin uses melismatic upper voices.

Basso continuo

Baroque accompaniment practice in which a keyboard or lute player realizes a figured bass line above a bass instrument, supplying chords and filling the harmonic texture throughout the piece.

Sonata form

Classical structure with an exposition presenting two contrasting themes, a development section transforming them, and a recapitulation returning them in the tonic key, often preceded by a slow introduction.

Zarzuela

Spanish lyric theatre genre alternating spoken dialogue with sung numbers; developed in the 17th century and flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries with composers such as Barbieri, Chueca and Chapí.

Hemiola

Rhythmic device in which the perceived grouping shifts, typically from two beats of three to three beats of two, common in Baroque cadences and in Spanish and Latin American dance music.

Heterophony

Texture in which several performers play the same melodic line simultaneously with individual variation, ornamentation or slight rhythmic displacement, common in folk and non-Western traditions.

Da capo aria

Baroque aria form (ABA) in which the singer returns to the opening section after a contrasting middle section, typically adding improvised ornamentation on the repeat.

Terraced dynamics

Baroque practice of changing volume by adding or removing instruments or manuals rather than by gradual crescendo, producing abrupt shifts between fixed dynamic levels.

Compound metre

Metre in which each beat divides into three equal parts, notated with upper numerals 6, 9 or 12 (e.g., 6/8); felt as two or four main beats with a lilting triplet subdivision.

Transposing instruments

Instruments whose written pitch differs from sounding pitch; B-flat instruments sound a major second lower, F instruments a perfect fifth lower, and piccolo sounds an octave higher than written.

Lead sheet

Score type giving only the melody, chord symbols and sometimes lyrics, leaving accompaniment and arrangement to the performer; standard in jazz, pop and folk repertoires.

Alberti bass

Accompaniment pattern in which a chord is broken into the order low–high–middle–high, producing a continuous arpeggiated texture typical of Classical keyboard music.

Ballet d'action

Reform promoted by Jean-Georges Noverre in the 18th century in which ballet became a dramatic narrative with expressive mime and unified music, dance and design rather than decorative spectacle.

Pointe technique

Dancing on the tips of the toes in reinforced shoes, developed in the Romantic ballet era (La Sylphide, 1832) and central to classical ballet vocabulary and its ethereal aesthetic.

Graham technique

Modern dance technique by Martha Graham built on contraction and release of the torso, spiral of the spine, and weight-driven floor work, expressing psychological and dramatic content.

Escuela bolera

Spanish classical dance school of the 18th and 19th centuries combining ballet technique with Spanish steps, castanets and bolero rhythms, performed to tonadillas and seguidillas music.

Sardana

Catalan circle dance in which participants join hands and move in measured steps; performed by a cobla ensemble of winds and double bass, with a characteristic 6/8-derived rhythm.

Xeremies

Balearic bagpipe with a chanter and drones, played with a small drum and flabiol in Mallorcan folk ensembles, accompanying ball de bot and traditional dance and song.

Flamenco compás

Cyclical rhythmic pattern of twelve beats with shifting accents (often 3, 6, 8, 10, 12) underlying palos such as soleares, alegrías and bulerías, realized by guitar, palmas and zapateado.

Breaking

Urban dance form from hip-hop culture featuring toprock, footwork, freezes and power moves, performed in cyphers and battles; inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2022.

Glosa

Balearic and Catalan tradition of improvised or semi-improvised sung verses on a given theme, performed in gatherings and festivals with strophic melodies and exchanged verses.

DAW

Digital Audio Workstation: software for recording, editing, arranging and mixing audio and MIDI, central to modern production and enabling home-studio composition and electronic music creation.

Culture industry

Concept by Adorno and Horkheimer describing mass-produced cultural goods standardized for consumption, arguing that commercial production reduces art to commodity and shapes passive audiences.

Streaming royalties

Payments to rights holders calculated per stream from platform revenue pools, typically fractions of a cent per play, allocated by pro-rata or user-centric models through collecting societies and distributors.

Participatory culture

Henry Jenkins's term for audiences who produce and circulate content (covers, dance challenges, remixes) rather than only consuming, blurring the line between creator and fan.

HIP

Historically informed performance: the approach using period instruments, historical tuning and pitch, documented ornamentation and rhetorical phrasing to recreate the sound world of earlier music.

Rubato

Expressive flexibility of tempo in which the performer speeds up or slows down within a phrase, often compensating so the overall pulse remains stable, typical of Romantic interpretation.

Continuo realization

The improvised or written completion of a figured bass into chords by a keyboard player, requiring knowledge of harmony, voice leading and the style of the period.

Head-solos-head

Jazz performance format in which the ensemble plays the tune (head), soloists improvise over its chord changes in turn, and the ensemble returns to the head to close.

Cadence types

Harmonic closures: authentic (V–I), plagal (IV–I), half (ending on V), deceptive (V–vi); identified by ear through bass motion and final chord quality.

Whole-tone scale

Scale built entirely of whole steps, dividing the octave into six equal parts; it produces an ambiguous, floating sonority associated with Impressionism and with harmonic uncertainty.

Timbre identification

Recognition of instruments by tone colour cues: nasal oboe, airy flute, bright trumpet, bowed string warmth, plucked guitar, and electronic synthesis, aided by register and articulation.