Music - CLEP Humanities

"Baroque" generally refers to the symphonic and orchestral music composed between 1600 and 1750, which now forms a large core of the classical music canon. Baroque music is defined stylistically by heavy ornamentation, intense orchestrations, and a focus on tonality, harmony, and counterpoint. Some of the significant composers of the Baroque period are Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann Pachelbel, and Henry Purcell.

The Brandenburg Concertos are widely considered the pinnacle of Johann Sebastian Bach's musical compositions. Presented to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721, the six concertos are the perfect exemplar of Baroque composition, featuring layered harmonies of various instruments in an ornate contrapuntal orchestration. The Concertos most likely took years to compose, and were only fully completed in 1721.

Johann Sebastian Bach is the composer most closely associated with the Baroque period. Bach's music, with its complex counterpoint melodies and harmonies, multilayered instrumentation, and formal structure, stands as representative of the entire era. Bach's music was seen as a high point of the Baroque era, and my of his works inspired developments away from Baroque music.

The guitar's rise in popularity took place in the late nineteenth century in Europe and America, largely thanks to a move away from large classical ensembles and more towards parlor music. The guitar's ability to play chords easily and accompany a singer made it become immensely popular, despite its lack of use in classical orchestras.

The guitar, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was structured to be an accompanying instrument instead of a lead instrument. As such, it was created to play chords easily, and was given six strings in closer tuning than the four-stringed violin or cello. Despite its humble origins, the guitar's functionality allowed it to become the main lead instrument in popular music.

A contemporary rival of Mozart, Salieri staged 37 operas in his lifetime, but did not write the Requiem in D Minor. Bach and Handel were a German composers in the early and mid-18th century. Beethoven died in the mid-19th century, and is known for works such as the Moonlight Sonata.

Gregorian chant is the style of music that developed throughout the Middle Ages, having various sources and styles. It was an ecclesiastical form of music, meaning that it was a "church" music. In particular, it was a kind of liturgical music, used in the various forms of public worship undertaken by the Latin Roman Catholic Church. Its melodies were based on the texts of the Mass, the Divine Office, and other liturgical ceremonies. Many of these texts were biblical, though adaptations from other sources are also found in many hymns and antiphons throughout the Middle Ages.

Strictly speaking, Gregorian Chant is a phenomenon of the Christian West. It was the liturgical music of the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, which dominated much (though not all) of Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages. While there were other forms of liturgical worship throughout this period, the Latin Rite was the "location" for the development of the Gregorian Chant repertoire. Its texts were taken from various parts of the liturgy, drawing on biblical sources as well as more original compositions by hymn and antiphon writers.

The pipes, trumpet, and harpsichord are not common Medieval instruments. Though is was an ancient stringed instrument also common in Medieval times, the lute was not associated with Apollo.

Frederic Chopin was a Polish-born composer of the Romantic Era, who was a child prodigy on the piano and began composing in his teens. As an adult, he moved to Paris, France, and became a well known composer of works for the piano, both solo and as a featured member of an ensemble.

The mandolin is the most famous member of the "mando" family that also includes the mandola and mandocello, among other instruments. The instruments in this family all have double courses of four strings, meaning that each string is paired with an exact twin, that is the same size and tuned to the same note. A mandolin is tuned just like a violin, while the mandola and mandocello are tuned like the viola and cello, respectively.

Tchaikovsky's 1880 masterpiece commemorates the Russian defense of the French invasion of 1812 during the Napoleonic Wars. Anachronistically, though, both anthems Tchaikovsky used to represent each army were not used during the 1812 invasion. Napoleon had banned "La Marseillaise" in 1805, and "God Save The Tsar" was not even written in 1812.

Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is considered the "Father of American Music" for his many famous and influential compositions, including "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Camptown Races," and "Oh, Susanna." Despite Foster's immense fame both at the time and in the years since, he was actually part of a broader popular music explosion thanks to sheet music's development. Among the other popular songs of the time was Daniel Decatur Emmet's "Dixie," from 1859.

Brass instruments, while deriving their name from the material they are usually made from, are not defined by the material from which they are composed. Instead, brass instruments are united by the the way air enters the instruments, and are each further controlled by a limited number of valves. A saxophone, despite its construction, is a woodwind due to its use of reeds and a series of tone holes the player can open and close.

The clarinet is a woodwind instrument, and produces sound like all woodwind instruments, by the player blowing through a reed and controlling the sound by opening and closing valves with his or her fingers. Every other instrument listed in some way uses a keyboard, or in the case of the organ, multiple keyboards.

Bluegrass is a form of folk music developed in the middle of the twentieth century, primarily in Appalachia. The musical form developed around string instruments, which were available and primarily used in square and barn dances in the region. The clarinet, a wind instrument, is the only instrument listed that is not a key element of bluegrass ensembles.

Jazz was born in nightclubs in cities throughout the south in the early twentieth century. A common problem for early jazz groups was an inability to be heard, and many advancements in amplifying sound were made because of jazz. As such, quieter acoustic string instruments like the mandolin never made a dent in jazz.

In the 1913 Paris Ballet season, the Russian artists Igor Stravinsky, a composer, and Vaslav Nijinsky, a choreographer, debuted the ballet The Rite of Spring. The extremely avant-garde nature of the piece nearly caused the audience to riot. Stravinsky's score played with every convention in music at the time, including rhythm, melody, and dissonance.

Developed in the ninth and tenth centuries in Western Europe, Gregorian chants are a simple, monophonic form of music used as sacred music by monks in the Catholic tradition. Gregorian chants helped spread the Latin Rite of Roman Christianity by having a common, uniform musical style for worship. Among certain monastic orders, the Gregorian chant is still a common form of worship.