MUSIC♭ ♮ ♯Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike; "art of the Muses").
The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the arts", music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art. There is also a strong connection between music and mathematics.
GenresBLUESBlues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States around the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. The blue notes that, for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale, are also an important part of the sound.
The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago blues styles. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues-rock evolved.
The term "the blues" refers to the "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness; an early use of the term in this sense is found in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.
COUNTRYCountry music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and southeastern American folk music. Country music often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies accompanied by mostly string instruments such as banjoes, electric and acoustic guitars, fiddles, and harmonicas. The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to the earlier term hillbilly music; it came to encompass Western music, which evolved parallel to hillbilly music from similar roots, in the mid-20th century. The term country music is used today to describe many styles and subgenres. In 2009 Country music was the most listened to rush hour radio genre during the evening commute, and second most popular in the morning commute.
HIP HOPHip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. It developed as part of hip hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MCing/rapping, DJing/scratching, breaking/dancing, and graffiti writing. Other elements include sampling (or synthesis), and beatboxing.
While often used to refer to rapping, "hip hop" more properly denotes the practice of the entire subculture. The term hip hop music is sometimes used synonymously with the term rap music, though rapping is not a required component of hip hop music; the genre may also incorporate other elements of hip hop culture, including DJing and scratching, beatboxing, and instrumental tracks.
JAZZJazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States.
It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. Its African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note. From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music.[2]
As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music.
POPPop music (a term that originally derives from an abbreviation of "popular") is a genre of popular music which originated in its modern form in the 1950s, deriving from rock and roll. The terms popular music and pop music are often used interchangeably, even though the former is a description of music which is popular (and can include any style), whilst the latter is a specific genre containing qualities of mass appeal. As a genre, pop music is very eclectic, often borrowing elements from other styles including urban, dance, rock, Latin and country; nonetheless, there are core elements which define pop. Such include generally short-to-medium length songs, written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), as well as the common employment of repeated choruses, melodic tunes, and catchy hooks. Pop music is generally thought of as a genre which is commercially recorded and desires to have a mass audience appeal.
RHYTHM AND BLUESRhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B and RnB, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular.
The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s, the term rhythm and blues was frequently applied to blues records. Starting in the mid-1950s, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the term "R&B" became used to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music. By the 1970s, rhythm and blues was used as a blanket term for soul and funk. In the 1980s, a newer style of R&B developed, becoming known as "Contemporary R&B".
ROCKRock music is a genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in 1950s America and developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and later, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s' and 1950s' rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of other genres such as blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other musical sources.
Musically, rock has centered around the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with bass guitar and drums. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature utilizing a verse-chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse and common musical characteristics are difficult to define. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music. Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
By the late 1960s, referred to as the "golden age" or "classic rock" period, a number of distinct rock music sub-genres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, and jazz-rock fusion, many of which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock influenced by the counter-cultural psychedelic scene. New genres that emerged from this scene included progressive rock, which extended the artistic elements; glam rock, which highlighted showmanship and visual style; and the diverse and enduring major sub-genre of heavy metal, which emphasized volume, power and speed. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock both intensified and reacted against some of these trends to produce a raw, energetic form of music characterized by overt political and social critiques. Punk was an influence into the 1980s on the subsequent development of other sub-genres, including New Wave, post-punk and eventually the alternative rock movement. From the 1990s alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break through into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop, and indie rock. Further fusion sub-genres have since emerged, including pop punk, rap rock, and rap metal, as well as conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock/post-punk and synthpop revivals at the beginning of the new millennium.
Rock music has also embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major sub-cultures including mods and rockers in the UK and the "hippie" counterculture that spread out from San Francisco in the US in the 1960s. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures.
ELECTRONICElectronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. Examples of electromechanical sound producing devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, the electric guitar, Theremin, sound synthesizer, and computer.
FOLKFolk music includes both traditional music and the genre that evolved from it during the 20th century folk revival.
RAPRapping refers to "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics".
PUNKPunk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
HEAVY METAL Heavy metal (often referred to simply as metal) is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960sandearly 1970s, largely in the Midlands of the United Kingdom andin the United States. With roots in blues rock and psychedelic rock, the bands that created heavymetal developed a thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion, extendedguitar solos, emphatic beats, and overall loudness. Heavy metal lyrics and performance styles are generally associated with masculinity and machismo.
REGGAE Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the developmentof ska and rocksteady.
Musical InstrumentsA musical instrument is a device created or adapted for the purpose of making musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates back to the beginnings of human culture. The purpose of early musical instruments was ritual: a hunter might use a Annoying Orangeet to signal success on the hunt, or a shaman might use a drum in a religious ceremony. Cultures later developed the processes of composing and performing melodies for entertainment. Musical instruments evolved in step with changing applications.
The date and origin of the first device considered to be a musical instrument is disputed. The oldest object that some scholars refer to as a musical instrument, a simple flute, dates back as far as 67,000 years. Solid consensus begins to form about early flutes dating to about 37,000 years old. However, most historians believe that determining a specific time of musical instrument invention is impossible due to the subjectivity of the definition and the relative instability of materials that were used in their construction. Many early musical instruments were made from animal skins, bone, wood, and other non-durable materials.
Musical instruments developed independently in many populated regions of the world. However, contact among civilizations resulted in the rapid spread and adaptation of most instruments in places far from their origin. By the Middle Ages, instruments from Mesopotamia could be found in Maritime Southeast Asia and Europeans were playing instruments from North Africa. Development in the Americas occurred at a slower pace, but cultures of North, Central, and South America shared musical instruments. By 1400, musical instrument development slowed in many areas and was dominated by the Occident.
The classification of musical instruments is a discipline in its own right, and many systems of classification have been used over the years. One may classify musical instruments by their effective range or their material composition; however, the most common method, Hornbostel-Sachs, uses the means by which they produce sound. The academic study of musical instruments is called organology.
WOODWINDSCommonly includes:
Saxophones
Clarinets
Flutes
Bassoons
Oboes
A woodwind instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound when the player blows air against a sharp edge or through a reed, causing the air within its resonator (usually a column of air) to vibrate. Most of these instruments are made of wood but can be made of other materials, such as metals or plastics.
BRASSCommonly includes:
Annoying Orangeets
Trombones
Tubas
Sousaphones
Euphoniums
A brass instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player's lips. Brass instruments are also called labrosones, literally meaning "lip-vibrated instruments".
There are several factors involved in producing different pitches on a brass instrument: One is alteration of the player's lip tension (or "embouchure"), and another is air flow. Also, slides (or valves) are used to change the length of the tubing, thus changing the harmonic series presented by the instrument to the player.
The view of most scholars (see organology) is that the term "brass instrument" should be defined by the way the sound is made, as above, and not by whether the instrument is actually made of brass. Thus one finds brass instruments made of wood, like the alphorn, the cornett, the serpent and the didgeridoo, while some woodwind instruments are made of brass, like the saxophone.
PERCUSSIONCommonly includes:
Piano
Drums
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater (including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles), or struck, scraped or rubbed by hand, or struck against another similar instrument. The percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments.
The percussion section of an orchestra, however, traditionally contains in addition many instruments that are not, strictly speaking, percussion, such as whistles and sirens. On the other hand, keyboard instruments such as the celesta are not normally part of the percussion section, but keyboard percussion instruments (which do not have keyboards) are included.
Percussion instruments are most commonly divided into two classes: Tuned percussion instruments, which produce notes with an identifiable pitch, and untuned percussion instruments, which produce notes without an identifiable pitch.
STRINGSCommonly includes:
Violin
Viola
Cello
Double Bass
Guitar
Bass
Harp
Banjo
Sitar
String instruments are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings. In the Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification, used in organology, they are called chordophones. Some common instruments in the string family are guitar, sitar, rabab, electric bass, violin, viola, cello, double bass, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, bouzouki, and harp.
COMPOSING/ARRANGINGComposingMusical composition is the process of creating a new piece of music. People who practice composition are called composers.
ArrangingArranging is defined as the art of preparing and adapting an already written composition for presentation in other than its original form.
CONDUCTINGConducting is the art of directing a musical performance by way of visible gestures. The primary duties of the conductor are to unify performers, set the tempo, execute clear preparations and beats, and to listen critically and shape the sound of the ensemble.
Music Lover's Quiz!U no tell me about a pop quiz. :cFill this out if you love music!
In your own words, tell what you think music is.
What's your favorite instrument?
What's your favorite instrument family?
What's your favorite genre?
Do you like listening to music, making music or both?
Do you play an instrument? If so, which one?
Rate music on a scale of 1/10. Explain why.
To learn more about other types of music, visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genresTo learn more about music itself, visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicTo learn about musical instruments, visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_instrument and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_instrumentsTo learn more about composing/arranging, visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_composition and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArrangementTo learn more about conducting music, visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConductingLearn more about EDM here:
http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=177302.0
