Notes, summaries, assignments, exams, and exercises for Music for Secondary education

Baroque art is characterized by its rich ornamentation and dramatic intensity, pursuing the exploration of form and the contrast of light and shadow.

Profane Vocal Music: The Birth of Opera

Characteristics of Opera

• Main profane vocal form.
• Understood as an entirely sung piece, written for orchestra, choirs, and soloists.

Early Operas

• First opera: Euridice by Jacopo Peri.
• First drama in music: L'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi (1607).

Parts of an Opera

Key Composers

• Antonio Vivaldi
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• George Frideric Handel

Vocal Parts

• Recitative: Halfway between spoken word and singing.
• Aria: A part sung by a soloist.

Instrumental Parts

• Overture: An instrumental introduction.
• Interludes: Connecting instrumental sections.
• Choruses and Ballets: Often integrated into

Membranophone Instruments Explained

Membranophone instruments produce sound through a vibrating membrane. Percussionists make the membrane vibrate by striking it with their hands or hitting it with wooden sticks called drumsticks or mallets.

Although many membranophone instruments have a system for adjusting the tension of the membrane or drum skin, only a few membranophones allow the percussionist to determine the precise pitch of the sounds the instrument emits. Membranophones are classified into two groups: pitched and unpitched.

Pitched Membranophones

Most instruments in this group have a single membrane and can emit a note that is tuned to a musical scale. The best-known instruments in this group include timpani (also called kettledrums),...

Circumstances Enabling Renaissance Art and Culture

• Economic prosperity followed the end of epidemics and famines in the Middle Ages. A new social class arose that demanded culture, art, and music: wealthy merchants (the bourgeoisie) became patrons of the arts, in addition to the nobility and the clergy.
• The birth of humanism, a mindset that promoted the development of art (not only religious art as before) to cater to human needs.
• The wisdom of Antiquity was widely spread, emphasizing human concerns.
• The invention of the printing press and travels around the world (including the arrival in America) eased the expansion of new trends.

How Humanism Influenced Renaissance Music

• The diffusion of knowledge affected music as well, helped by the printing

Gregorian Chants: We call them Gregorian chants, in honor of Pope Gregory I (540-604), who was their first compiler. Western music comes from the medieval chants of the Catholic Church.

Characteristics of Gregorian Chants:

• The song is a capella, only voice with no instruments.
• The subject is religious. It is a prayer.
• All the voices sing the same melody, so the texture is monophonic or monodic.
• The language is Latin.
• Its rhythm is free (without a time signature) and it flows with the text.
• The authors are anonymous.

Troubadours: Troubadours are in the countryside playing instruments of the period (the harp, bagpipe, and shawm). Songs were not religious. It developed mainly in France in the 12^th and 13^th centuries.

Characteristics of Troubadour Music:

Classical Music

Transformation from the Early Modern Period to the Contemporary Age

Music between 1730 and 1820

The Rest of the Arts

Neo-classicism. 18th Century: The Age of Enlightenment. Music started to get closer to private houses and public concerts.

Classical Composers

• Liberal artists
• Wanted to reach out to new audiences
• Music: human, natural, pleasant for everyone
• Predominated formal clarity and melodic simplicity

Secular Vocal Music

• Most important: Classical Opera
• Opera underwent a change during the Classicism, which made it tend towards naturalness. It eliminates the excess of the Baroque and took the plots and the characters closer to the new audience.
• Opera Seria: Most important composer C.W. Gluck, who laid the foundation of the new opera in

Sound, Noise & Silence

Essentially, music is sound and the way it orders tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity. Sound is produced when an object vibrates, and it is what can be perceived by a living organism through its sense of hearing. It travels through physical mediums by sound waves, and it is normally a pleasant feeling.

Noise is a disagreeable auditory experience, but this is a subjective definition (for instance, most percussion instruments produce noises when they are played). Anyway, the physical difference between sound and noise is the sort of waves: sound waves are regular, while in noise, the wave is irregular.

Finally, silence is the...

Classification of Music

Music is classified based on several criteria:

• Function: Religious (liturgical or non-liturgical) and Profane.
• Audience: Cultured, popular, folk, or pop.
• Content and Presentation:
  • Programmatic: Created for a specific purpose.
  • Descriptive: Describes an event or occurrence.
  • Dramatic: Linked to a text or narrative.
  • Pure or Abstract: Music without a specific concrete end.

Historical Eras of Music

Middle Ages (5th–15th Century)

The primary musical form was the Gregorian Chant, consisting of monodic Latin texts sung by monks. Later, polyphony emerged, with the organum as its first form. Folk music was transmitted by troubadours (nobles) and jugglers (commoners).

Renaissance (15th–16th Century)

Inspired by the culture of antiquity,...

A History of Popular Music Genres

The Birth of Work Songs

A large part of the Black population worked on cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta in the southern part of the United States. There, enslaved people would sing songs to make the long workdays more bearable. That is where work songs originated. The characteristics of these songs were a marked beat and a call-and-response pattern typical of African music.

The Rise of Jazz in New Orleans

Jazz music first appeared in New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century and was inspired by European military marches and the polka. In this style, the main melody could be modified to the performer's liking. The main characteristics of jazz music are:

• Marked rhythm
• Frequent use of syncopation
• Instrumental