Classical Music Terminology

Commonly Asked Questions

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C-sharp Minor

C-sharp minor is a minor scale based on C♯, with the pitches C♯, D♯, E, F♯, G♯, A, and B. Its key signature consists of four sharps.

The C-sharp natural minor scale is:

Changes needed for the melodic and harmonic versions of the scale are written in with accidentals as necessary. The C-sharp harmonic minor and melodic minor scales are:

Its relative major is E major. Its parallel major, C-sharp major, is usually replaced by D-flat major, since C-sharp major, which contains seven sharps, is not normally used. Its enharmonic equivalent, D-flat minor, having eight flats, including the B, has a similar problem. Therefore, C-sharp minor is often used as the parallel minor for D-flat major. (The same enharmonic situation occurs with the keys of A-flat major and G-sharp minor.) 😃

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What Is Absolute Music ?

Absolute Music is instrumental music, such as a concerto or string quartet, that draws no inspiration from or makes no reference to a text, program, visual image, or title and exists solely in terms of its musical form and elements. The idea of absolute music developed at the end of the 18th century in the writings of authors of early German Romanticism, such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann but the term was not coined until 1846 where it was first used by Richard Wagner in a programme to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The aesthetic ideas underlying absolute music derive from debates over the relative value of what were known in the early years of aesthetic theory as the fine arts. 

Philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, dismissed music as "more enjoyment than culture" because of its lack of conceptual content, thus treating as a deficit the very feature of music that others celebrated. Johann Gottfried Herder, in contrast, regarded music as the highest of the arts because of its spirituality, which Herder attributed to the invisibility of sound. It is music purely for the sake of music, art for art's sake, and dependent on structure alone for its subjective comprehension. 😄

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What is a Toccata ?

The Toccata is a musical form for keyboard instruments, written in a free style that is characterized by full chords, rapid runs, high harmonies, and other virtuoso elements designed to show off the performer’s “touch.” The earliest use of the term (about 1536) was associated with improvised solo lute music.

In the late 16th century in Venice such composers as Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Merulo wrote organ toccatas (many with such titles as Fantasia and Intonazione), often achieving a majestic virtuosity by means of florid scale passages, embellishments, unsteady rhythms and harmonies, changes of mood, and freedom of tempo. Merulo initiated the later common practice of alternating fugal sections (using melodic imitation) with rapid toccata passages. In Rome, Girolamo Frescobaldi (d. 1643) composed toccatas that consisted of highly improvisatory sections loosely strung together, marked by sudden changes in harmonies and figuration. They were intended to be played with a free tempo and could be performed in their entirety or in one or more sections. Frescobaldi’s German pupil Johann Jakob Froberger was an important exporter of the style to Germany. Like his teacher, Froberger delighted in the use of chromatic harmonies (using notes foreign to the mode of the piece); and, like Merulo, he characteristically placed a contrasting fugal section between introductory and closing passages in toccata style.

The contrast of improvisatory and fugal passages—which appealed to the Baroque fascination with the union of opposites—became a prominent feature of the toccatas of the organist-composers of north Germany, culminating in the works of Dietrich Buxtehude and, later, J.S. Bach. Buxtehude’s toccatas, in contrast to, for example, those of Frescobaldi, are shaped by an underlying formal structure. Two, even three, fugal sections often alternate with toccata passages, and the fugue subjects are frequently variations of a basic motif. In the late Baroque era, as in a number of works of J.S. Bach, the association of the two opposite styles often took the form of an improvised first movement (termed prelude, toccata, fantasia, etc.) followed by a fugue, as in Bach’s well-known Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565, for organ. Toccatas were occasionally composed after the Baroque era, a notable example being the third section of Claude Debussy’s suite Pour le piano (composed 1896–1901). 😉

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What is a Minuet ?

A minuet is a social dance of French origin for two people, usually in 3/4 time. The word was adapted from Italian minuetto and French menuet, possibly from the French menu meaning slender, small, referring to the very small steps, or from the early 17th-century popular group dances called branle à mener or amener. The term also describes the musical form that accompanies the dance, which subsequently developed more fully, often with a longer musical form called the minuet and trio, and was much used as a movement in the early classical symphony.

Minuets were introduced—to opera at first—by Jean-Baptiste Lully, who included no fewer than 92 of them in his theatrical works and in the late 17th century the minuet was adopted into the suite, such as some of the suites of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Händel. Around Lully's time it became a common practice to score this middle section for a trio (such as two oboes and a bassoon, as is common in Lully’s music). As a result, this middle section came to be called the minuet's trio, even when no trace of such an orchestration remains. The overall structure is called rounded binary or minuet form. After these developments by Lully, composers occasionally inserted a modified repetition of the first (A) section or a section that contrasted with both the A section and what was thereby rendered the third or C section, yielding the form A–A′–B–A or A–B–C–A, respectively; an example of the latter is the third movement of Mozart's Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525, popularly known under the title Eine kleine Nachtmusik. 

A livelier form of the minuet simultaneously developed into the scherzo (which was generally also coupled with a trio). This term came into existence approximately from Beethoven onwards, but the form itself can be traced back to Haydn. The minuet and trio eventually became the standard third movement in the four-movement classical symphony, Johann Stamitz being the first to employ it with regularity. 😌

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What Does Opus Mean ?

Opus (1695–1705 Latin: work, labor, a work) is a musical composition or set of compositions usually numbered in the order of its issue. Mendelssohn's Opus 90 is his Italian Symphony, for example, and Brahms's Op. 77 is his Violin Concerto. Since many composers' works were never given opus numbers in an orderly way, they now often have catalog numbers assigned by later scholars. So Haydn's Symphony No. 104 is Hob.104 (Hob. is short for Anthony van Hoboken, the cataloger), and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro is K.492 (K. stands for Ludwig Köchel). 😏

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What is a Nocturne ?

A nocturne (from the French which meant nocturnal, from Latin nocturnus) is usually a musical composition that is inspired by, or evocative of, the night. The name nocturne was first applied to pieces in the 18th century, when it indicated an ensemble piece in several movements, normally played for an evening party and then laid aside. Sometimes it carried the Italian equivalent, notturno, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Notturno in D, K.286, written for four lightly echoing separated ensembles of paired horns with strings, and his Serenata Notturna, K. 239. At this time, the piece was not necessarily evocative of the night, but might merely be intended for performance at night, much like a serenade. The chief difference between the serenade and the notturno was the time of the evening at which they would typically be performed: the former around 9:00pm, the latter closer to 11:00 pm. In its more familiar form as a single-movement character piece usually written for solo piano, the nocturne was cultivated primarily in the 19th century. 

The first nocturnes to be written under the specific title were by the Irish composer John Field, generally viewed as the father of the Romantic nocturne that characteristically features a cantabile melody over an arpeggiated, even guitar-like accompaniment. However, the most famous exponent of the form was Frédéric Chopin, who wrote 21 of them. One of the most famous pieces of 19th-century salon music was the "Fifth Nocturne" of Ignace Leybach, who is now otherwise mostly forgotten. Later composers to write nocturnes for the piano include Gabriel Fauré, Alexander Scriabin, Erik Satie (1919), Francis Poulenc (1929), as well as Peter Sculthorpe. In the movement entitled 'The Night's Music' ('Musiques nocturnes' in French) of Out of Doors for solo piano (1926), Béla Bartók imitated the sounds of nature. It contains quiet, eerie, blurred cluster-chords and imitations of the twittering of birds and croaking of nocturnal creatures, with lonely melodies in contrasting sections. American composer Lowell Liebermann has written eleven Nocturnes for piano, of which No.6 was arranged by the composer as Nocturne for Orchestra. Other notable nocturnes from the 20th century include those from Michael Glenn Williams, Samuel Barber and Robert Helps. 😏

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What is a Divertissement ?

Divertissement is a musical term for a song within an opera or ballet which does not further the plot. It is also a ballet made entirely of such loosely connected dances and an instrumental piece of light music. The term is originally a French word meaning diversion or amusement.

Composer Jean-Baptiste Lully established divertissements as a traditional part of French opera in the mid 1600s and they remained popular through the 18th century. They can be played within acts or at the end of the opera. A similar song performed between acts is more commonly called an intermede or intermezzo instead of a divertissement. Many composers still include them in the 21st century, but they are not as common.

In ballet and opera, a divertissement creates a pause in the action. For example, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet “The Nutcracker” contains several divertissements. After the main characters, Clara and the Nutcracker, defeat the Mouse King, they return to the Nutcracker’s palace, where many of his subjects perform dances for them. These dances are often considered the highlights of the ballet, even though very little happens in the storyline. 😄

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What Is The Difference Between Piano 4-hands and a Piano Duo ?

Piano four hands is a type of piano duet involving two players playing the same piano simultaneously. A duet with the players playing separate instruments is generally referred to as a piano duo.

Music written for piano four hands is usually printed so that the part for each player occupies the page which is directly opposite to him. The upper part, for the pianist sitting on the right and with the music on the right side of the page, is called primo, while the lower part, for the pianist on the left, is called secondo.

The piano duet came to popularity in the second half of the 18th century. Mozart played duets as a child with his sister, and later wrote sonatas for four hands at one piano; Schubert was another composer who composed for the genre, notably with his Fantasy in F minor, D. 940. Jane Bellingham in The Oxford Companion to Music lists other composers who wrote piano duets, including Brahms, Dvořák, Grieg, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartók. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries French piano duets included Bizet's Jeux d'enfants, Fauré's Dolly Suite and Ravel's Ma mère l'oye. 😄

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What Is Chamber Music ?

Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers, with one performer to a part (in contrast to orchestral music, in which each string part is played by a number of performers). However, it usually does not include solo instrument performances. Because of it’s intimate nature, chamber music has been described as "the music of friends" and was pioneered by the classical era composer Franz Joseph Haydn. 😉

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What Is Rubato ?

Tempo rubato is a musical term referring to expressive and rhythmic freedom by a slight speeding up and then slowing down of the tempo of a piece at the discretion of the soloist or the conductor. Rubato is an expressive shaping of music that is a part of phrasing.

While rubato is often loosely taken to mean playing with expressive and rhythmic freedom, it was traditionally used specifically in the context of expression as speeding up and then slowing down the tempo. In the past, expressive and free playing (beyond only rubato) was often associated with the terms "ad libitum". Rubato, even when not notated, is often used liberally by musicians, e.g. singers frequently use it intuitively to let the tempo of the melody expressively shift slightly and freely above that of the accompaniment. This intuitive shifting leads to rubato's main effect: making music sound expressive and natural. 😄

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What Is An Octet ?

In music, an octet is a musical ensemble consisting of eight instruments or voices, or a musical composition written for such an ensemble.

Octets in classical music are one of the largest groupings of chamber music. Although eight-part scoring was fairly common for serenades and divertimenti in the 18th century, the word "octet" only first appeared at the beginning of the 19th century, as the title of a composition by Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, whose Octet Op. 12 (published posthumously in 1808) features the piano, together with clarinet, 2 horns, 2 violins, and 2 cellos. Later octets with piano were written by Ferdinand Ries (Op. 128, 1818, with clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and double bass), Anton Rubinstein (Op. 9, 1856, with flute, clarinet, horn, violin, viola, cello, and double bass), and Paul Juon (Chamber Symphony, Op. 27, 1907). 😄

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What is a Symphonic Poem ?

Symphonic poem, also called Tone Poem, is a musical composition for orchestra inspired by an extra-musical idea, story, or “program,” to which the title typically refers or alludes. The characteristic single-movement symphonic poem evolved from the concert-overture, an overture not attached to an opera or play yet suggestive of a literary or natural sequence of events (e.g., Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave, also called Hebrides Overture).

Both the term symphonic poem and the form itself were invented by Franz Liszt, who in works such as Les Préludes (1848; after Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques) used thematic transformation to parallel the poetic emotions. The musical form is free, though somewhat akin to the sonata form used in the first movement of symphonies. 😌

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What Is A Sonata ?

The Sonata is a type of musical composition, usually for a solo instrument or a small instrumental ensemble, that typically consists of two to four movements, or sections, each in a related key but with a unique musical character.

Deriving from the past participle of the Italian verb sonare, “to sound,” the term sonata originally denoted a composition played on instruments, as opposed to one that was cantata, or “sung,” by voices. Its first such use was in 1561, when it was applied to a suite of dances for lute. The term has since acquired other meanings that can easily cause confusion. It can mean a composition in two or more movements, or separate sections, played by a small group of instruments, having no more than three independent parts. Most frequently it refers to such a piece for one or two instruments, such as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (1801) for piano. By extension, sonata can also refer to a composition for a larger instrumental group having more than two or three parts, such as a string quartet or an orchestra, provided that the composition is based on principles of musical form that from the mid-18th century were used in sonatas for small instrumental groups. The term has been more loosely applied to 20th-century works, whether or not they rely on 18th-century principles.

Quite distinct from all of the preceding, however, is the use of the term in “sonata form.” This denotes a particular form, or method of musical organization, typically used in one or more movements of multimovement instrumental works written since the beginning of the Classical period (the period of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven) in the mid-18th century. Such works include sonatas, string quartets and other chamber music, and symphonies. 😉