TALKING ABOUT MUSIC 5TALKING ABOUT MUSIC
The study of music, as the preceding section suggests, embraces the study of how
people use music: how music functions socially to create a sense of individual and
group identity, how it sets the tone of ritual events—not only inaugural concerts
but also weddings, funerals, commencement ceremonies, and senior proms—as
well as how it is passed on from generation to generation. But any worthwhile
study of music must also delve into the actual sounds and the way they operate
together to create musical meaning. To talk intelligibly about such matters, we
need to develop at least a rudimentary technical vocabulary, a way of talking
about specifi c musical features. The remainder of this introduction will help you
lay the foundation for developing that vocabulary as you study the many types of
music that have been made in the United States.
We may begin with the characteristics of a single musical sound—a tone* or,
more casually, a note—and then proceed to talk about how musicians combine
tones of varying characteristics to create more-complex musical structures.
Imagine a single note plucked on a guitar string. In your imagination, how
long does that note continue to ring? Duration is an important characteristic
of any tone, and this temporal aspect of music—how it unfolds in time—is called
rhythm.
Is the note loud or soft? Volume, or dynamics, is another important charac-
teristic of musical sound.
Is it a high note or a low note? Pitch is yet another characteristic of central
importance in music, especially when tones of various pitches are combined to
create melody and harmony.
Finally, imagine that guitar note once again, then imagine a note of identical
duration, volume, and pitch, but played on a banjo. The difference between the
two notes is one of tone color, or timbre (pronounced tam'-ber), another crucial
element in how we experience music.
Now let’s take a closer look at each of these characteristics, observing how
musical patterns emerge by varying the characteristics of notes fi rst in succes-
sion, then in simultaneous combinations. You can hear examples of these char-
acteristics by listening to short segments of the recordings that accompany this
textbook.RHYTHM
Notes of varying duration can be combined to create different rhythmic pat-
terns. Perhaps the simplest rhythmic pattern would be a steady succession of
notes of equal duration, as at the beginning of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Notice that after six notes of equal length, the seventh (on the word “star”) is
twice as long. That seven-note pattern—six shorts and a long—is then repeated,
six times in all, to complete the song. This simple rhythm sounds child-
like in “Twinkle, Twinkle,” but in a psalm tune like Old Hundred (LG 1.2),
a nearly identical pattern sounds sturdy and resolute, befi tting the sacred text.
(The names of hymn and psalm tunes are conventionally printed in small caps.)
Conversely, the highly irregular rhythm of the piano part in Ruth Crawford*Defi nitions of terms printed in boldface may be found in the Glossary on pp. A1–A13.172028_00b_001-017_INTRO_r3_ko.indd 5 23/01/13 9:47 AM