Notes, summaries, assignments, exams, and problems for Music

Renaissance Music in Italy

Secular Music

Italian secular music features:

• Homophonic writing
• Syllabism
• Simple, higher melody
• Various types of interpretation (a cappella, with voice substitution for an instrument, or just instrumental)
• Strophic structure
• Lively, animated rhythms
• Simple harmony

Forms:

• Frottola: A form of polyphonic singing that was developed especially in aristocratic and bourgeois circles. The theme is love, with 4 voices and a dance-like rhythm.
• Villanela: A Neapolitan folk song of origin, with a dance-like rhythm and 3 voices. Instruments were also used.
• Madrigal: A song of contrapuntal distillation derived from a troubadour song, making allusions to pastoral poetry with a sentimental or erotic theme, and is for 4 voices.

Religious Music

Venetian

Religious Music of the Middle Ages

Religious music of the Middle Ages began to take shape when Emperor Constantine granted freedom of worship for Christians in 313.

Pope Gregory the Great and Gregorian Chant

Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) was considered the creator of the Gregorian chant, but he was not really the creator. He leveraged his entire organization as a way to strengthen a sense of Christian unity.

Characteristics of Gregorian Chant

Gregorian chant is:

• Music destined to serve the liturgy.
• Uses Latin as a language.
• Monodic in texture.
• Free musical rhythm, according to the melody.
• Text notation differentiates between three styles of chant: syllabic, neumatic, and melismatic.

Troubadours and Minstrels

Troubadours: Poets and musicians, usually... Continue reading "Medieval Religious Music: From Gregorian Chant to Polyphony" »

Albéniz

Rhythm: Binary regular, constant 2/4. Allegro grazioso, moderately fast and graceful. Black note = unit. The right hand plays the melody with staccato eighth notes. These articulated sixteenth notes should sound like half notes going into silence.

The left-hand notes attack with a quaver on the strong part of the bar, quietly leaving the rest of each bar. The three thirty-second notes in the introduction function as arpeggios, and four processional rolls give way to the tune of "La Tarara."

Melody: The theme dominating Section A is taken from a very popular song. It has a symmetrical scheme. The melody is 16 measures long. The melody is anacrustic for joint degrees, overlooking the 2nd and 3rd. The staccato interpretation gives a blank... Continue reading "Albéniz's "Corpus Christi en Sevilla": Musical Analysis" »

Spanish Literature: From Renaissance to Baroque

Mannerism

As a movement of transition between the Renaissance and Baroque, Mannerism was used to define elaborate artists' works. This current arises as a reaction to classicism, characterized by the rejection of rigid rules and the free use of forms. Based on literary theory, a clear example is in the sonnets of Góngora and Lope.

Baroque

There was a great development of poetry. Everything could be poetic material. It is a poetry of contrasts because there is a meditative face, a difficult and misleading world, and almost every issue addressed from a mock perspective. Sonnet and romance are common forms.

The essential feature of the Baroque mentality is distrust in itself. Topics such as disappointment

Morphosyntactic Resources

• Anaphora: Repetition of a word at the beginning of each verse.
• Parallelism: Repetition of structures.
• Anadiplosis: Repetition of the last word at the end and beginning of a verse.
• Concatenation: Several anadiplosis in a row.
• Epanadiplosis: Repetition of a word at the beginning and end of the verse.
• Pun: Repetition of words by reversing the order.
• Chiasmus: Repetition in which there is a cross-distribution of elements in the same structure.
• Hyperbaton: Changing the natural order of a sentence.
• Pun: Repetition of words that sound alike, and at least one of which is composed of two terms.
• Epithet: Adjective that expresses a quality of the accompanying noun.
• Pleonasm: Redundancy through repetition, i.e., adding unnecessary terms.

**Literary Devices**

• Alliteration: The repetition of the same sounds.
• Anaphora: The repetition of a word or words at the beginning of each line or each prayer.
• Paronomasia: Aesthetic appeal is achieved by placing near paronym words and, almost always, alliteration.
• Epanadiplosis: Repeating the same word at the beginning and end of a verse, or a syntactic period, in prose.
• Hyperbaton: Disturbing the logic of the sentence.
• Parallelism: Repetition of syntactic structures or similar elements.
• Concatenation: When a syntactic structure starts with the same word that completed the previous structure.
• Metaphor: An identification that leads from the concrete and visual to the abstract and transcendent.
• Metaphorical language: Establishing an identity between

Romanticism and the Renaixença

Romanticism (from French: *roman* - novel) is based on overwhelming feelings. Born in Germany, [Romanticism] dislikes the climate where it lives and needs to flee. It is a period of cultural and artistic movements, [like] the Renaixença, Romanticism, and Realism. This movement swept across Europe in the early and late 19th century. 1833 is considered the starting point of the Renaixença, with the publication of Bonaventura Carles Aribau's ode, "La Pàtria" (The Homeland) in the journal *El Vapor*. It culminates with the restoration of the Jocs Florals (Floral Games). The term designates:

1. The period between Decadence and Modernism.
2. A cultural movement and nationalist awareness.

Key points highlighted include:

• Reconstructing

Figures of Speech

Sound Devices:

• Alliteration: Repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or stressed syllables.
• Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds within words.
• Consonance: Repetition of consonant sounds within or at the end of words.
• Onomatopoeia: Words that imitate sounds.

Figurative Language:

• Anaphora: Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.
• Anadiplosis: Repetition of the last word of one clause or verse at the beginning of the next.
• Antithesis: Juxtaposition of contrasting ideas.
• Apostrophe: Addressing an absent person, abstract idea, or inanimate object.
• Asyndeton: Omission of conjunctions between words or phrases.
• Chiasmus: Repetition of words in reverse order.
• Ellipsis: Omission of words

Literary Themes

Recurring themes in literature include:

• Carpe diem (seize the day): Encourages embracing the present moment.
• Collige, virgo, rosas (girl, gather roses): Advises young women to enjoy their youth.
• Beatus ille (blessed is he): Praises a life of tranquility away from societal pressures.
• Golden Mean: Advocates for moderation and balance.
• Locus amoenus (pleasant place): Describes an idyllic and beautiful landscape.
• Ubi sunt? (where are they?): Reflects on the passage of time and the loss of past figures.

Metrics in Poetry

Metrics involve counting syllables in verses. Examples include:

• Trisyllabic
• Tetrasyllabic
• Hexasyllabic
• Heptasyllabic
• Octosyllabic
• Enneasyllabic
• Decasyllabic
• Endecasyllabic
• Dodecasyllabic
• Tridecasyllabic
• Alexandrine
• Pentadecasyllabic
• Octometer

An... Continue reading "Literary Devices and Metrics in Poetry" »

The Writing of Music

Greek and Roman music was alphabetic, assigning each sound a letter of the alphabet. In the 9th century, this type of notation was changed to neumatic notation. The neumes are signs that are placed on syllables, singing and trying to draw the melodic line. Inadvertently, they indicate exact length but serve only as a reminder. The singers devoted many years to memorizing all the melodies.

In the 10th century, the monk Hucbald had the idea of drawing parallel horizontal lines that corresponded to a different pitch. Another monk the following century, Guido d'Arezzo (995-1050), decided to use the lines as well as spaces. Guido d'Arezzo also gave each note the name you know currently. In the 13th century, a first proportional... Continue reading "Medieval Music History: Gregorian Chant to Polyphony" »