Guitar is one of the most popular and widely used instruments.. The guitar is popular because it is portable, flexible, polyphonicA polyphonic instrument is capable of playing chords, like a guitar or piano

And due to its popularity, there are many materials available to learn with.. As far as portability goes, you can’t really beat the guitar

It is lightweight, and can fit easily in the trunk of a car or even the overhead bin of an airplane. After transport, it requires little maintenance or assembly

This article needs additional citations for verification. A suite, in Western classical music and jazz, is an ordered set of instrumental or orchestral/concert band pieces

The separate movements were often thematically and tonally linked.[1] The term can also be used to refer to similar forms in other musical traditions, such as the Turkish fasıl and the Arab nuubaat.. In the Baroque era, the suite was an important musical form, also known as Suite de danses, Ordre (the term favored by François Couperin), Partita, or Ouverture (after the theatrical “overture” which often included a series of dances) as with the orchestral suites of Christoph Graupner, Telemann and J.S

It was revived in the later 19th century, but in a different form,[2] often presenting extracts from a ballet (Nutcracker Suite), the incidental music to a play (L’Arlésienne, Masquerade), opera, film (Lieutenant Kije Suite) or video game (Motoaki Takenouchi’s 1994 suite to the Shining series),[3] or entirely original movements (Holberg Suite, The Planets).. Estienne du Tertre published suyttes de bransles in 1557, giving the first general use of the term “suite” ‘suyttes’ in music, although the usual form of the time was as pairs of dances

In music, a pedal point (also pedal note, organ point, pedal tone, or pedal) is a sustained tone, typically in the bass, during which at least one foreign (i.e. A pedal point sometimes functions as a “non-chord tone”, placing it in the categories alongside suspensions, retardations, and passing tones

Pedal points “have a strong tonal effect, ‘pulling’ the harmony back to its root”.[2] Pedal points can also build drama or intensity and expectation. When a pedal point occurs in a voice other than the bass, it is usually referred to as an inverted pedal point[3] (see inversion)

The pedal tone is considered a chord tone in the original harmony, then a nonchord tone during the intervening dissonant harmonies, and then a chord tone again when the harmony resolves. A dissonant pedal point may go against all harmonies present during its duration, being almost more like an added tone than a nonchord tone, or pedal points may serve as atonal pitch centers.

Question: What is one Characteristic that describes Baroque art and music?. Answer: Baroque music included great Dramatic grandeur.

Question: When and where did Baroque music first appear?. Answer: Baroque music first appeared around 1600 in Italy.

Question: What is the Idea that different musical moods could and should be used to influence the emotions of the listener known as?. Question: Did Baroque composers make their music more dramatic by having a variety of moods within each movement?

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.. ricercare, (Italian: “to seek out”) plural ricercari, also spelled ricercar, musical composition for instruments in which one or more themes are developed through melodic imitation; it was prominent in the 16th and 17th centuries

Soon thereafter the style was adopted in keyboard music. Well-suited to the technical capabilities of the lute, they mixed passages in chordal style, running scale passages, and alternation of high and low phrases that suggested the many-voiced texture of polyphonic music

Andrea Gabrieli and other Venetian composers often wrote ricercari based only on one theme treated extensively in the manner of the later fugue—e.g., by stretto (playing the theme against itself with repeated, closely spaced entrances) and augmentation and diminution (playing the theme in longer or shorter note values). Johann Sebastian Bach, master of the fugue, used the term ricercar for two pieces in The Musical Offering (1747).

Cantus firmus: (“Fixed song”) The process of using a pre-existing tune as the structural basis for a new polyphonic composition.. Choralis Constantinus: A collection of over 350 polyphonic motets (using Gregorain chant the cantus firmus) written by the German composer Heinrich Isaac and his pupil Ludwig Senfl.

Counterpoint: Combining two or more independent melodies to make an intricate polyphonic texture.. Fauxbourdon: A musical texture prevalent in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, produced by three voices in mostly parallel motion first-inversion triads

Glogauer Liederbuch: This German part-book from the 1470s is a collection of 3-part instrumental arrangements of popular French songs (chanson).. Homophonic: A polyphonic musical texture in which all voices move together note-for-note in chordal fashion, and when there is a text it is rendered at the same time in all voices.

Baroque music is one of the most fascinating and complex classical styles, with intricate harmonies, ornate melodies, and dramatic contrasts. But what characteristics does Baroque music set it apart from others? Let’s explore the key characteristics of Baroque music, from its use of monody and basso continuo to its complex harmonies and virtuosic instrumentation

One of the most notable characteristics of Baroque music is the use of contrast. This can be seen in the difference between different instruments, sections of a piece, or parts of a single melody

Other defining characteristics of Baroque music are monody and basso continuo.. Monody is a style of music in which a single voice or melody is accompanied by simple chords rather than a complex polyphonic texture

Composition Before Rameau: Harmony, Figured Bass, and Style in the Baroque. The relationships between music history, music theory, and composition at times seem so tenuous today that it is easy to forget that those three areas of specialization have split off from one another only recently, and that the practice of one can hardly be carried out successfully without some interpenetration with the other two

The most famous of the eighteenth-century theorists is, of course, Jean-Philippe Rameau, who also—a fact sometimes overlooked by historians of theory—was one of the best composers of his generation and the long-awaited successor to Lully as master of French opera and ballet. Rameau’s conception of the fundamental bass as the generator of harmony and harmonic progression seems to have been a genuine innovation, and one which furnished the basis for most of the important theory, above all that of harmonic function, which followed in the course of the next century and a half.1 Yet as Heinrich Schenker realized, Rameau represents only one side, and in Schenker’s view the less incisive side, of eighteenth-century theory.2 Representing the other side are the German writers on figured bass and related topics, above all C.P.E

Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, particularly the final chapter on the improvisation of keyboard fantasias, represents an approach to composition and improvisation which Bach seems to have shared with other members of the Berlin and North German schools of composers, including J.S. Bach and his other sons and students.3 Johann Philipp Kirnberger presented a similar conception of composition in his Kunst des reinen Satzes, which also includes theoretical discussions that seem to have been intended to adapt Rameau’s theory of harmony to the more contrapuntally conceived harmony of the Bach circles.4 In their practical precepts, Bach’s Versuch and Kirnberger’s Kunst belong to a tradition that seems to have first been expressed in the Handleitung zur Variation of Friedrich Erhardt Niedt, the second volume of a three-part composition manual.5 It was here that the idea of composition as the elaboration of a figured bass line—the basis of both C.P.E

Before we begin our first historical periods, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it will be important that you become familiar with some of the basic elements of music. The next few readings will focus on those basic elements

This slideshow introduces some of the basic concepts involved in musical structure or form. This slideshow does not get into the subject of specific large scale forms, such as sonata allegro or theme and variations, because we won’t encounter those structures until we study the Classical era

While there are many different approaches to describing the building blocks of music, we often break music down into five basic elements: melody, texture, rhythm, form, and harmony. While it’s true that not every piece of music contains all of those elements, it is very likely that every piece of music you have listened to recently does.