Musical Devices
-isms
"Popular Music"
Time and Place
Jobs
100

Richard Wagner used this kind of theme or motive to represent a certain character, thing, event, or emotion.

Leitmotiv

100

One of the most widespread cultural phenomena in nineteenth-century Europe, this ideology inspired composers to write music representative of their ethnic heritage.

Nationalism

100

Syncopation is the defining trait of which turn-of-the-century musical genre?

Ragtime

100

Antonin Dvorak, Symphony No. 9, "From the New World"

The United States in the late 1800s

100

This term, coined by Heinrich Heine, describes the intense fandom surrounding Franz Liszt as a touring artist, including fans collecting memorabilia, wearing Liszt’s portrait, and keeping his coffee grounds.

Lisztomania

200

This recurring musical theme represents the object of the narrator’s affections in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

Idée fixe

200

This term generally describes music, art, and literature from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century whose creators sought to offer something new and distinctive while maintaining strong links to past classics.

Modernism

200

Consumers of sheet music for the piano in the nineteenth century belonged mostly to these socioeconomic classes.

Middle and upper class


200

Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5

The Soviet Union in the 1930s

200

Known as the "King of Ragtime," this composer began his career as a traveling pianist playing in dances, social clubs, and brothels.

Scott Joplin

300

This German composer of Lieder wrote piano accompaniment to enact a certain character or mood.

Franz Schubert

300

This musical technique is meant to evoke a place, people, or social setting that is (or is perceived or imagined to be) profoundly different from accepted local norms in its attitudes, customs, and morals.

Musical Exoticism

300

This nineteenth-century composer had such a massive following that his fans would make pilgrimages to his opera house in Bayreuth from all over the world.

Richard Wagner

300

Carl Maria von Weber, Der Freischütz

Berlin in the early 19th century

300

This composer developed his musical language not only from his formal training in the experimental classical style, but also from their background as arranger for W.C. Handy's dance band.

William Grant Still

400

In this system, a “row” of pitches might appear in “prime,” “retrograde,” or “inverted” form.

Serialism

400

Claude Debussy, the opera Salomé, and the modern-day tarot deck are all associated with this artistic movement.

Symbolism

400

This composer's "Americanist" style incorporates folksong, uses musical texture to depict wide, open space, and is meant to be accessible to a general audience.

Aaron Copland

400

Claude Debussy, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune

France around the turn of the 20th century

400

This famous opera composer (on your final exam study list) was essentially in a role of service to a theater impresario, a librettist, and a performing cast.

Gioachino Rossini

500

Charles Ives is well-known for this compositional technique, in which the complete statement of the main theme is not heard until the end of the piece.

Cumulative Form

500

According to dictionaries in the U.S.S.R., this artistic technique was a “creative method based on the truthful, historically concrete artistic reflection of reality in its revolutionary development.”

Socialist Realism

500

This song, originally from a "Brechtian" opera by Kurt Weill, became a popular jazz standard and pop number in its own right.

"The Ballad of Mack the Knife"

500

Igor Stravinsky, Rite of Spring (where did it premiere?)

France in the early 20th century

500

Charles Ives's background as an insurance salesman probably gave him the idea to distribute this publication on potential buyers' doorsteps alongside his Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–1860.

"Essays Before a Sonata"