Matura History of Music key terms

A system in which chords are understood by their role within a key, such as tonic, dominant, or subdominant, and progress toward resolution. It underpins most tonal music from the Baroque to the Romantic era.

A melodic or harmonic formula that gives a sense of closure at the end of a phrase. Types include perfect authentic, imperfect authentic, half, plagal, and deceptive, each with different closing strength.

A change from one key to another within a composition, often prepared by a pivot chord or a dominant of the new key. It creates contrast and long-range tension in tonal forms.

A large-scale structure common in first movements of Classical works, typically with an exposition presenting themes in contrasting keys, a development exploring and fragmenting them, and a recapitulation resolving them in the tonic.

The opening section of a sonata-form movement, or of a fugue, in which the main thematic material is presented. In sonata form it usually moves from the tonic to a contrasting key.

The central section of sonata form that follows the exposition. It treats previously heard themes through fragmentation, sequence, and modulation, often building instability before the recapitulation returns.

The final section of sonata form in which the exposition's themes return, now adjusted so that the secondary material remains in the tonic key, restoring stability and resolution.

A Baroque notation placing numbers and symbols under a bass line to indicate the intervals and chords a keyboard or lute player should realize, leaving rhythm and voicing partly to the performer.

A Baroque accompaniment practice in which a bass instrument and a chordal instrument play from a figured bass line, providing harmonic support and rhythmic drive to an ensemble.

A Baroque structure, especially in concertos, in which a recurring orchestral passage alternates with contrasting episodes for soloists, creating a pattern of return and departure.

A Baroque concerto type contrasting a small group of soloists, the concertino, with the full orchestra, the ripieno. Corelli and Handel wrote prominent examples.

A contrapuntal composition built on a subject imitated in successive voices, often with an answer, countersubject, and episodes. It represents the height of Baroque polyphonic craft.

The art of combining independent melodic lines that sound harmonious together. It is central to Renaissance polyphony and Baroque fugue and is often taught through species exercises.

A technique in which a melodic idea is repeated in another voice or part, sometimes at a different pitch or interval. It is fundamental to motets, fugues, and canons.

The principal melodic idea of a fugue or other imitative work, announced at the outset and then treated in other voices. Its answer and countersubject shape the piece's texture.

A pre-existing melody, often plainchant, used as the structural basis of a polyphonic composition. Renaissance composers built masses and motets around such borrowed tunes.

Monophonic, unaccompanied liturgical chant of the medieval Western church, sung in Latin and often in free rhythm. Gregorian chant is the best-known repertory.

A scale type or pitch system, such as the church modes or later major and minor scales, that organizes melody and harmony around a central tone and characteristic intervals.

The central liturgical service of the Catholic Church, and by extension a musical setting of its fixed texts, usually including Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.

A polyphonic choral composition on a sacred Latin text, prominent in the Renaissance. It differs from the mass by setting a single text rather than the full liturgy.

A secular polyphonic song for several voices, popular in the Renaissance and early Baroque, often setting expressive Italian poetry and using word painting.

A technique in which musical gestures reflect the literal meaning of the text, such as rising lines for heaven or descending lines for grief. It is common in madrigals and Baroque vocal music.

Instrumental music that depicts a story, scene, or idea, often explained by a title or written program. It flourished in the Romantic era in symphonic poems and character pieces.

A single-movement orchestral work from the Romantic era that illustrates a literary or pictorial idea. Liszt pioneered the genre, and Strauss and Smetana wrote famous examples.

A short musical idea associated with a character, object, or idea, developed and transformed throughout a work. Wagner used it extensively in his music dramas.

A German art song for voice and piano, especially from the Romantic era. Composers such as Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms elevated it to a serious concert genre.

A song structure in which the same music is repeated for each stanza of text. It contrasts with through-composed settings, where new music follows the changing text.

A form in which music is newly composed for each section of text rather than repeating a fixed stanza pattern. It suits dramatic or narrative songs and opera scenes.

A tendency in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music to draw on folk melodies, dances, legends, and history of a particular nation or region, often as a statement of cultural identity.

A musical style around 1900, associated with Debussy, favoring timbre, color, and atmosphere over clear tonal progressions, often using whole-tone and pentatonic scales and unresolved chords.

A six-note scale built entirely of whole steps, producing an ambiguous, floating sound without a clear tonic. It is a hallmark of Impressionist and some twentieth-century music.

A method of composition, codified by Schoenberg, in which all twelve pitch classes are ordered in a row that may be transposed, inverted, or retrograded, ensuring no pitch dominates.

A compositional approach extending twelve-tone principles to other parameters such as rhythm, dynamics, and timbre, often associated with post-war composers like Boulez and Stockhausen.

Music that avoids a tonal center and the traditional hierarchy of consonant and dissonant chords. It emerged in the early twentieth century in works by Schoenberg and his circle.

Music in which some elements, such as order, duration, or pitches, are left to chance or performer choice. It was explored by Cage, Lutosławski, and others after 1950.

A Polish term for a style of the 1960s that treats sound color, texture, and massed clusters as the main compositional material, associated with Penderecki, Lutosławski, and Górecki.

A Polish dance in triple meter with characteristic accents on the second or third beat. Chopin transformed it into a concert genre, and it also appears in Polish national opera.

A stately Polish processional dance in triple meter, often with a festive or patriotic character. Chopin's polonaises are central works of the piano repertory.