Music History and Literature
Domain 2 spans roughly a millennium of Western art music (plus non-Western traditions). Most items ask you to place a work by its style markers, genre, and likely composer rather than by its title alone.
Period markers
Medieval: chant, organum, Notre Dame polyphony (Léonin, Pérotin), Ars nova notation and Machaut’s secular polyphony. Renaissance: imitative polyphony, the mass and motet, Josquin, Palestrina’s counter-Reformation clarity, the English madrigal (Byrd, Morley). Baroque: basso continuo, monody, da capo aria, ritornello, concerto grosso, fugue - Bach, Handel, Vivaldi. Classical: sonata form, the symphony and string quartet - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Romantic: lieder, program music and the tone poem (Berlioz, Liszt), Wagner’s leitmotif, Verdi, Brahms, Chopin, nationalism. Modern: Debussy’s impressionism, Stravinsky’s primitivism, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, Bartók, Copland, minimalism.
Genre and function
Ask what the piece is for: church (mass, motet, chorale), court (chanson, madrigal), concert hall (symphony, concerto), salon (character piece), theater (opera, ballet). Function predicts texture, forces, and language.
Worked example
An excerpt shows a continuo realization, a solo violin alternating with a recurring orchestral refrain, and a slow–fast tempo pairing. Continuo plus ritornello plus solo/tutti alternation equals a Baroque solo concerto: the recurring refrain is the ritornello, and the fast outer movements are likely in ritornello form.
Traps
Assigning sonata form to the Baroque; treating Handel’s oratorios and Bach’s Passions as one genre; mixing Ars antiqua with Ars nova; calling Beethoven “Romantic” without noting his transitional position; overlooking jazz, spirituals, and folk traditions, which are testable.