1: Music Fundamentals
- Page ID
- 76164
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Learning Objectives
- Recognize a wide variety of sounds, comparing and contrasting them using musical elements of pitch, volume, articulation, and timbre.
- Aurally identify important performing forces (use of the voice and instruments) of Western music.
- Define basic elements of melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture, build a vocabulary for discussing them, and recognize them when examples are played.
- Identify basic principles of musical forms.
- Listen to music and describe its musical elements and forms.
- Compare and contrast categories of art music, folk music, and pop music.
- Identify ways in which humans have used music for social and expressive purposes
- 1.2: Performing Forces for Music
- Music consists of the intentional organization of sounds by and for human beings. In the broadest classification, these sounds are produced by people in three ways: (1) through the human voice, the instrument with which most of us are born, (2) by using musical instruments, or (3) by using electronic and digital equipment to generate purely electronic sounds.
- 1.5: Melody
- The melody of a song is often its most distinctive characteristic. The ancient Greeks believed that melody spoke directly to the emotions. Melody is the part of the song that we hum or whistle, the tune that might get stuck in our heads. A more scientific definition of melody might go as follows: melody is the coherent succession of definite pitches in time. Any given melody has range, register, motion, shape, and phrases. Often, the melody also has rhythmic organization.
Thumbnail: String quartet performing for the Mozart Year 2006 in Vienna. (CC BY 2.5; Gryffindor via Wikipedia)