Musical Components Glossary

Rhythm:

Rhythm is what lies behind a piece of music which gives it a regular and consistent pulse. It is created with a repeated pattern which recurs throughout a piece and is usually defined by the drums or percussion. Rhythm has nothing to do with any actual notes played, only the lengths of the notes and rests between them.

Melody:

A melody is usually the focus of a musical piece and comes to the foreground when listening or performing. A melody is the notes played in a phrase of music and is normally used to refer to a repeated phrase. Typically a melody will be played at a higher pitch in most pieces of music than the accompaniment.

Harmony:

Where a combination of more than one note is played at the same time. Most commonly used to talk about pleasant sounding combinations like chords and vocal harmonies

Tonality:

The tonality is used to describe whether a key is major or minor

Timbre:

Timbre is used to describe unique qualities of sounds and notes e.g. warm, bright, sharp etc.

Texture:

This is how different parts of a song work together to form the whole piece like the top melodic line, harmony parts, accompanying parts and bottom rhythmic/percussive parts. Texture is used to describe the quality of the sound for the complete piece.

Dynamics:

The volume at which a piece of music should be played. There can be different dynamics in a piece of music, and different parts can be played at different dynamic levels. Sometimes in music there is a dynamic change, which is shown on written music by dynamic markings (crescendo <, decrescendo >) and italian terms (forte, piano etc)

Tempo:

Tempo is the speed at which a piece of music is played. It is measured in beats per minute (bpm), and is defined on sheet music by different italian terms (such as largo and allegro).

Articulation:

The various kinds of performance instructions in a piece of music give advice on how notes should be played. Different types of articulation include legato, staccato, accents, slurs and rubato among others.

Time Signatures:

A way of describing how many beats and how long the beats are in each bar. When written out, the top number refers to number of beats in each bar while the bottom number indicates what type of beat that is e.g. 4/4 is 4 crotchet (¼) beats and 6/8 is 6 quaver (⅛) beats

Note Values:

A note value determines how long a note should be played for in a piece of music. These are written out using various symbols such as crotchets, dots, quavers, minims and semibreves

Simple/Complex Times:

Simple time signatures are times in duple or triple time which can easily be divided up into twos or threes such as 4/4 ¾ 6/8 and 2/4. Complex time signatures can’t be divided like this and exist as a combination of duple and triple time e.g 7/4 which can’t divide by two or three but can be broken down to a bar of 4/4 and a bar of ¾ or ⅝ which could be broken into a bar of ⅜ and a bar of 2/8

Regular/Irregular Rhythms:

A regular rhythm is a rhythm with a consistently recurring beat, whereas an irregular rhythm doesn’t follow a consistent pattern.

Syncopation:

Syncopation is where music is played off the regular pulse of the piece. This is normally done by having notes and chords fall between the main beats. This is commonly used in reggae and ska.

Metronome Markings:

Metronome markings are written on a piece of music to show what tempo a metronome should be set at and the whole piece should be played at. They are expressed in bpm

BPM:

Beats per minute (BPM) is a way of measuring the tempo of a piece of music. It is measured by counting how many beats there are of the pulse in a piece of music within one minute. For example 60 bpm is the same as counting every second, and 120 bpm would be twice as fast.

Tempo Instructions:

Tempo instructions are a group of Italian terms that are used on sheet music to describe how fast a piece should be played. Although they aren’t an exact definition of how fast something should be played, there are general guidelines as to what BPM they should be played at eg: lento, prestissimo

Styles of Music:

Categories which are used to describe and define music, and group together music of a similar kind

#listeningskills #glossary #unit14 #141