New Zealand Scholarship Music Assessment flashcards

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

Sonata form

An exposition presenting primary and secondary themes in contrasting keys, a development transforming that material, and a recapitulation resolving both themes into the tonic, often preceded by a slow introduction and followed by a coda.

Secondary dominant

A chromatic chord that functions as the dominant of a diatonic chord other than the tonic, notated as V/x, briefly tonicising that chord and intensifying forward harmonic motion within the phrase.

Modal mixture

Borrowing chords or scale degrees from the parallel mode of the same tonic, such as a minor subdominant in a major key, producing colour change without changing the tonal centre.

Neapolitan chord

A major triad built on the lowered second scale degree, usually in first inversion, functioning as a predominant that resolves to the dominant and is common in minor-key and Romantic harmony.

Augmented sixth chord

A predominant chord containing an augmented sixth interval between lowered sixth and raised fourth degrees, appearing in Italian, French, or German forms and resolving outward to the dominant octave.

Hemiola

A rhythmic device where the prevailing metre is temporarily reinterpreted, typically turning two groups of three beats into three groups of two, creating metric tension before the original metre returns.

Ostinato

A short melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic pattern repeated persistently, often unchanged, beneath varying material, used to build texture and generate cumulative intensity in sectional or minimalist works.

Through-composed form

A structure in which new music is composed for each successive section rather than repeating earlier material, typical of art song settings where the text's changing meaning drives continuous musical development.

Terraced dynamics

A Baroque practice of changing volume by moving abruptly between fixed dynamic levels rather than crescendoing gradually, reflecting the plucked and harpsichord-based instruments of the period.

Basso continuo

A Baroque accompaniment comprising a bass line with figures indicating harmony, realised by a keyboard or plucked instrument plus a sustaining bass, giving performers latitude in voicing and texture.

Taonga pūoro

Māori traditional musical instruments, including flutes such as pūtōrino and kōauau and percussion such as pahū, understood as having their own voices and genealogical relationships.

Waiata

A Māori song genre encompassing laments, love songs, and topical songs, where text, melody, and performance context carry whakapapa and collective memory rather than standing as abstract music.

Kapa haka

A Māori performing arts discipline combining waiata, haka, poi, and moteatea, assessed on group precision, vocal quality, and the appropriateness of repertoire to the occasion.

Pacific polyphony

Layered vocal textures found across Pacific islands, often with a sustained bass line beneath moving upper parts, reflecting communal singing practice and church-influenced harmonic traditions.

Programme note

A short text accompanying a performance that introduces the work, composer, and interpretive approach, functioning as a secondary source that frames an audience's listening expectations.

Primary source

Evidence created at or near the time of the work's creation or performance, such as the autograph score, a contemporary recording, an interview, or an archival programme.

Performance practice

The historically informed conventions of performing a period's music, including tuning pitch, temperament, ornamentation, articulation, and ensemble size, reconstructed from treatises and scores.

Rubato

A flexible treatment of tempo in which the performer takes time from one part of a phrase and gives it back elsewhere, preserving the phrase's overall span while shaping its expressive contour.

Motif

A short, recognisable musical idea, melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic, that is repeated and transformed across a work to create unity and generate development.

Harmonic rhythm

The rate at which chords change, measured in beats or bars; its acceleration or slowing is a principal means of building and releasing tension independent of surface note density.

Texture types

Categories describing how musical lines relate: monophonic single line, homophonic melody with accompaniment, polyphonic independent lines, and heterophonic simultaneous variants of one line.

Da capo aria

A Baroque aria in ternary form where the singer repeats the opening section after a contrasting middle, adding improvised ornamentation that demonstrates technical command and expressive judgement.

Leitmotif

A recurring musical idea associated with a character, object, or concept, transformed in harmony, rhythm, and orchestration as the drama develops, central to nineteenth-century operatic technique.

Whole-tone scale

A six-note scale built entirely from whole steps, lacking a leading tone and producing harmonic ambiguity, used by late Romantic and Impressionist composers to dissolve tonal expectation.

Octatonic scale

An eight-note scale alternating whole and half steps, offering symmetrical harmonic possibilities and used by Russian and twentieth-century composers for unstable, non-functional harmonic colour.

Klangfarbenmelodie

A technique distributing a melodic line across instruments so that timbre changes become the primary carrier of the melody, associated with early twentieth-century Viennese modernism.

Serialism

A compositional method ordering all twelve pitch classes into a row whose transpositions, inversions, and retrogrades generate pitch material, replacing tonal hierarchy with systematic relations.

Minimalism

A style built on short repeated cells, steady pulse, and gradual process-based change, where interest arises from phase shifting and additive transformation rather than thematic development.

Spectrogram

A visual plot of frequency against time with intensity shown by shading, used analytically to evidence timbral change, vibrato rate, or precise attack timing in a recording.

Triangulation

Supporting an analytical claim with three independent kinds of evidence, typically score, recording, and documented context, and discussing any disagreement among them rather than ignoring it.

Edition criticism

The evaluation of a published score's reliability by identifying its editor, source material, and editorial additions, so that interpretive choices can be attributed to composer or editor.

Programme rationale

A stated justification linking the performed works by a coherent thread, such as chronology, shared genre, cultural connection, or progressive technical demand, articulated in the written commentary.