The Music Dictionary
Music History and Forms Terms
Every history term in The Music Dictionary, with its meaning in music.
- Aleatoric music
- Music incorporating chance or performer choice into composition or realization.
- Antiphony
- An exchange of musical phrases between contrasting groups or locations.
- Ars nova
- A fourteenth-century musical movement associated with new rhythmic notation and polyphony.
- Ballad
- A narrative song or, in jazz and popular music, often a slow lyrical piece.
- Ballet
- A theatrical dance tradition whose music supports choreographed movement and narrative.
- Baroque
- A broad period of European music, roughly 1600–1750, with diverse styles and practices.
- Cantata
- A vocal composition with multiple sections, frequently for voices and instruments.
- Chaconne
- A variation-based form often built over a recurring harmonic or bass pattern.
- Classicism
- An aesthetic associated with clarity, proportion, and balance, especially in the Classical era.
- Concerto
- A work featuring soloist or soloists in dialogue with an ensemble.
- Continuo
- A Baroque accompaniment practice realizing harmony from a bass line.
- Dodecaphony
- Composition with all twelve pitch classes, organized through an ordered series.
- Early music
- A flexible label often covering medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque repertoires.
- Elegy
- A work expressing mourning, reflection, or remembrance.
- Étude
- A study designed to develop a particular technical or musical skill.
- Expressionism
- An artistic approach emphasizing intense psychological states and heightened gesture.
- Fantasia
- A composition suggesting freedom of form, improvisation, or imaginative contrast.
- Folk revival
- A movement renewing interest in traditional music and its contemporary reinterpretation.
- Gregorian chant
- A repertory of Latin liturgical monophonic chant developed over centuries.
- Impressionism
- A label for music emphasizing color, atmosphere, and fluid harmonic relationships.
- Intermezzo
- A short intermediate movement or independent character piece.
- Minimalism
- A compositional approach often using repetition, gradual change, and limited materials.
- Motet
- A polyphonic vocal composition. Medieval motets set several texts at once, often in Latin and French and sometimes secular. From the Renaissance onward the motet is usually a sacred choral setting of a Latin text.
- Musique concrète
- Electroacoustic composition built from recorded sounds transformed and organized as music.
- Neoclassicism
- A twentieth-century approach revisiting older forms, textures, or stylistic ideals.
- Nocturne
- A character piece often associated with night, lyricism, and intimate expression.
- Opera seria
- Eighteenth-century Italian serious opera on heroic or mythological subjects, built mainly from recitatives and da capo arias.
- Overture
- An instrumental introduction to an opera, stage work, or concert program.
- Passacaglia
- A variation form often built over a repeated bass or harmonic foundation.
- Pastoral
- Music evoking rural landscapes, shepherd imagery, or an idealized natural world.
- Plainchant
- A body of monophonic liturgical singing, often without measured rhythm.
- Program music
- Instrumental music associated with an extra-musical narrative, image, or idea.
- Renaissance polyphony
- Interwoven vocal lines characteristic of much European music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
- Requiem
- A musical setting connected with the Mass for the Dead or a work of remembrance.
- Romanticism
- A broad nineteenth-century aesthetic emphasizing individuality, expression, and expanded musical language.
- Serialism
- The systematic ordering of musical elements, initially pitches and later sometimes other parameters.
- Sinfonia
- A Baroque name for an instrumental piece, often an opening movement to an opera or cantata, and a forerunner of the symphony.
- Sonata
- A multi-section or multi-movement instrumental work, with varied historical meanings.
- Soundscape composition
- Music that uses environmental sounds or evokes an acoustic environment.
- Spectralism
- Composition informed by the frequency spectrum and evolving timbre of sound.
- Suite
- A collection of contrasting movements, historically often dances.
- Symphonic poem
- A one-movement orchestral work commonly inspired by literary or pictorial ideas.
- Symphony
- An extended orchestral composition, often in multiple movements.
- Toccata
- A virtuosic piece emphasizing keyboard or instrumental agility and gesture.
- Tone poem
- An orchestral composition shaped by a narrative or extra-musical idea.
- Troubadour
- A medieval lyric poet-composer associated with the Occitan-speaking courts.
- Variation set
- A succession of contrasting treatments of shared thematic material.
- Verismo
- An operatic tendency emphasizing vivid human drama and relatively direct theatrical realism.
- Waltz
- A dance and musical form typically in triple meter with a characteristic recurring pulse.
- Zarzuela
- A Spanish form of lyric theater that alternates spoken scenes with songs, choruses, and dances.
More subjects: Theory and Harmony · Rhythm and Tempo · Melody and Form · Performance · Instruments · Voice and Stage · Jazz and Popular Music · Sound and Technology · World Traditions
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