Musical Elements
The element of music that constitutes the temporal aspect of sound
Rhythm
A way of making connections between closely-related works and musical artists that share stylistic, formal, and cultural elements is to categorize the works by _________.
genre
The Italian terms crescendo, decrescendo, forte, mezzo forte, and mezzo piano all refer to
Dynamics
The technique of assigning a unique theme to each character, object, place, and idea in a drama is the use of ______.
leitmotif
Distance between two pitches
interval
The word that refers to how fast or how slow a pulse occurs
Tempo
During _________, the musical performers vary material by creating music in the moment, rather than relying upon fixed pitches and rhythms.
improvisation
The element of music that has to do with how pitches are begun, sustained and released
Articulation
Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelungs derives from ______ mythology.
Norse
A set of only seven pitches that forms the basis for most music
Scale
When pulses are organized into groups containing strong and weak beats, we refer to this as
Meter
The composer who wrote the scores for the original Star Wars trilogy (among the best-known musical works created for the big screen)
John Williams
The ability to recognize differences between voices (like your mother versus your sister) and between instruments even if they are playing the same pitch (like a flute versus a trumpet) is due to variances in
timbre
The theme that represents “Loge as fire” uses the following to represent fire:
Rising and falling dynamic levels and pitches to represent the unpredictable nature of fire spreading across the ground
True or False: The chromatic pitch set includes most of the pitches used in Western music, but not all of them.
False
The first strong pulse in each meter
downbeat
participates in recording sessions for television and film
session musician
Monophonic, polyphonic, heterophonic, and homophonic are all terms that refer to a musical work’s
Texture
What Opera/Act/Scene does the appearance of Logo, the demigod of fire, Wotan’s spear, a ring of fire, and Brunnhilde’s sleep all occur?
The final scene (Act III, Scene 3) of The Valkyrie
The part of a musical work that you typically sing along with or that might get stuck in your head
Melody
The term that refers to the relative highness or lowness of sound
Pitch
Some of the musical characteristics of the “Main Theme” that tell us Luke Skywalker is a hero are:
the use of brass instruments, duple meter, steady tempo, major mode, and leaps to the upper tonic
The way a musical work unfolds over time, or its ________, typically relies upon repetition, variation, and contrast.
form
True or False: Wagner shrunk the size of the orchestra for The Ring of the Nibelungs in order to highlight characters with single instruments.
False
The element of music that has to do with loudness or softness
Volume