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impressionism, in music

(Encyclopedia)impressionism, in music, a French movement in the late 19th and early 20th cent. It was begun by Debussy in reaction to the dramatic and dynamic emotionalism of romantic music, especially that of Wagn...

chord, in music

(Encyclopedia)chord, in music, two or more simultaneously sounding pitches. In tonal music the fundamental chord is called the triad. It consists of three pitches, two a perfect fifth apart and a third pitch a majo...

chorus, in music

(Encyclopedia)chorus, in music, large group of singers performing in concert; a group singing liturgical music is a choir. The term chorus may also be used for a group singing or dancing together in a musical or in...

fife, in music

(Encyclopedia)fife, small transverse flute with six to eight finger holes adopted for military music by Swiss regiments serving in France in the late 15th cent. The fife was used in the British army until the end o...

America, in music

(Encyclopedia)America, in music, a patriotic hymn of the United States. The words (beginning “My country, 'tis of thee”) were written in 1832 by Samuel Francis Smith while he was a theological student in Andove...

scale, in music

(Encyclopedia)scale, in music, any series of tones arranged in a step-by-step rising or falling order of pitch. A scale defines the interval relationship of each tone to the others upon which the composition depend...

rococo, in music

(Encyclopedia)rococo, in music, 18th-century reaction against the baroque style. Less formal and grandiose in structure, it was a graceful rather than a profound style, more hedonistic than venturesome. Extreme man...

baroque, in music

(Encyclopedia)baroque, in music, a style that prevailed from the last decades of the 16th cent. to the first decades of the 18th cent. Its beginnings were in the late 16th-century revolt against polyphony that gave...

pitch, in music

(Encyclopedia)pitch, in music, the position of a tone in the musical scale, today designated by a letter name and determined by the frequency of vibration of the source of the tone. Pitch is an attribute of every m...

time , in music

(Encyclopedia)time, in music: see tempo; meter; rhythm; syncopation; metronome and musical notation. ...