CUST 2045P - a glossary

CUST 2045 Music and Society - GLOSSARY 


'A A B A' - Capital letters are used to name [repeated] Sections of a song; an 'A A B A' song repeats the first section, followed by a different section, follows by the first again; this entire unit of four sections is repeated as a unit; sections with particular names and functions use the capital letter of their name, such as 'V' for Verse, 'C' for Chorus.


Accent – a sound or syllable given relatively greater emphasis, through loudness or force of articulation 


Acculturation – the (cultural) result of contact between distinct cultures or subcultures, especially hybrids, fusions, and other blends


Art [of] music – contrasted to (“merely”) functional music, or to popular; also called “fine art [of] music”


Articulation – the separation (and conjunction) of sounds in a phrase


Artworld - Howard Becker's general term for the social formation created by all the different roles and perspectives that interact and combine to produce the artistic experience 


Authentic[/genuine] The notion that good [popular] music is not the product of artificial professionalism, or of an administered culture industry, but the honest, usually raw, sometimes crude, but always “genuine” feelings of the artist 


Beat – a pulse which is part of a regular group called a measure


Beat Feeling – the particular (internal) sensation of the motion from pulse to pulse that is created by shading the beats, by phrasing early or late, and by the interaction of patterns such as characteristic rhythm . The key notion of beat feeling is that the same basic beat and tempo can produce very different sensations, depending on how it is played by the ensemble.


Boredom - for Adorno, the result of trying to do something with your time without genuine involvement or engagement; in passive entertainment, the stimulus only seems to keep us interested, but really just masks our boredom 


Bridge – A song section , usually defined by its contrast to other sections


Characteristic Rhythm – a brief (almost never more than two bars) pattern figure, usually in an accompaniment part, repeated throughout a dance piece. Through the repetition of pattern and the generation of a beat feeling, the characteristic rhythm outlines the basic steps of a dance. Especially in Latin music, the characteristic rhythm can be created through the combination of many patterns; their interaction generates the beat feeling.


Chorus – a section usually defined by one or more of: same words and same melody every time; many voices instead of one; repetitious words, often including the title or moral point (“Don’t let your sons grow up to be hamsters!”); (somewhat) louder; often preceded by a crescendo or drum fill


Class structure – see Social Class 


Coda – the final portion of a song structure, where the performance doesn’t simply stop at the end of the last note; may be a new idea, but usually consists of earlier material repeated, such as the chorus


Composer – in common usage, a person who person who creates musical pieces such as songs, film scores, or symphonies, by writing down music notes on paper; more broadly, anyone who generates musical ideas; a person who sings to themselves in the shower can be a composer


Consumption – blanket term for the distribution, purchase, and enjoyment of music; the term is not meant to suggest that listening to music is like eating food, but rather that we must acquire music in order to enjoy it


Content Analysis - Simon Frith’s term for studying a song (or poem) by abstracting the subject matter, and discussing it separately from the actual experience of the song or poem


Context – see recontextualization 


Control group – In Seeger, what an interest or pressure group seeks to become


Convention – in Howard Becker’s usage, a feature of social behaviour that has established its familiarity through custom and tradition


Culture – the particular patterns of action defined by values, such as customs of language, music, food, sexual conduct, dress, art, design, and so on [I try to avoid “and so on”—but it’s pretty well necessary here!]


Crescendo – Italian for “get[ting] louder”; a crescendo means a passage that does this


Dance- A principle of musical experience, in which the time is organized in conjunction with (or patterned on) the rhythms of physical action; see also Song, Ritual 


Diminuendo – Italian for “getting softer,” i.e. quieter
Dissemination – a mode of distributing or reproducing cultural action; see distribution


Distribution – the circulation and supply of music to people who are not physically present for its performance, through electronic media such as the radio and internet, and physical media such as tapes and CDs


Division of Labour – the pattern of roles assigned to fulfil the basic requirements of social organization and sustaining life; used by Howard Becker to explain the assignment of different tasks involved in the production of artistic experience; a concert in which a person sings all their own songs and accompanies themselves on guitar has a different division of labour than one in which performers read notation created by a composer, who may not be otherwise involved


Enculturation – the process of passing values from one generation to the next 


Entertainment – a particular function of music, often mistakenly presumed to be universal


Feeling – in musical contexts, feeling means sensations that are based in the particular qualities of the flow of time; these qualities are usually created by particular differences, such as stress/unstress, loud/soft, and the connections & transitions between them


Folk art/fine art/popular art – Seeger’s basic classification of North American music genres; see his article for definitions & details; the relations between them have been the principle basis for North American musical history


Folk Society – a form of social organization in which the means of production are almost entirely community-based, stability and continuity are prized over innovation and change, division of labour is minimal, and individual variations in experience are slight


Form – the overall relation between the parts and sections of a song or piece; loosely contrasted to structure


Genre – a principle of correlation or similarity between musical experiences and texts; genre can be based on instrumentation (string quartet, big band), context (drinking songs, hymns), social group identity (bubble gum, Latin music), function (marching songs, TV commercials), aesthetics (avant garde), musical procedure (improvised music, jam), and more


Ideology - a set of beliefs that guides individuals as well as social classes; a precondition for thought; and, for our purposes, a useful way to think about how people make judgements regarding musical value; see value ; in the Frith article, the Marxist view that the prevailing social ideas are the ideas of the ruling class; these ideas are expressed in popular literature, culture, and music


Immigration – in musical (and cultural) terms, a common source of acculturation 


Improvise/Improvisation – to create or make up on the spot, as opposed to repeating something memorized, or a rendering written text; in music, roughly comparable to everyday speech, or to speaking without a script


Institutions – in social theory, the physical and behaviour mechanisms created to solve social needs and realize values; the educational institution consists not only of buildings, but also of a trained staff of teachers, administrators, support personnel, and students; the family, the media, and private institutions such as churches are also parts of it


Interest group, pressure group – in Seeger, people with a shared vision of the role of music in North America [see Make America Musical/Sell America Music] 


Lacedaemonians – the last word in shiftlessness


Lyrical Realism – In Frith’s article, “a direct relationship between a lyric and the social or emotional condition it describes or represents


Make America Musical/Sell America Music – in Seeger, the two primary interest groups that emerged among North American settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries; one pushed for the adoption of European classical music as America’s national standard, the other for the predominance of a home-grown industry-based music


Means of Production – the system used by a society to answer its needs, basic and otherwise; the tools and technologies of manufacture


Measure/Bar – a regular group of pulses, based on (sub)groupings of two [duple] or three [triple]; 


Mode – a scale, an orderly succession of tones; the basis for melodies


Myth – a story or idea that provides an explanation for some aspect(s) of cultural experience, hence the basis for ritual ; the usage of “untrue story” stems from the fact that the emphasis in myth is on making sense of the world rather than literal narration; thus myths can be embodied in music as well as words and images, as (narrative) embodiments of the values and identity of a culture; see ideology


Oral tradition – dissemination of cultural ideas and knowledge through voice and memory


Performer, Performance – the act of making music, and the person(s) who do(es) this; does not automatically imply “professional”!


Professional [musician] — Generally, a person who performs music and is paid for it; more significantly, someone who has achieved a (recognized) professional standard of performance, such as consistency, specific skills (such as reading music or playing by ear), extensive knowledge or a repertory, etc.


Passamezzo moderno – a simple bass pattern that arose toward the end of the Renaissance in Italy, used as basis for dances and variations; it is very prominent in North American Protestant hymns (such as “Amazing Grace”) and secular folk and popular songs (such as “Jesse James”)


Popular Culture – not self-produced, primarily entertainment, urban


Popular Music – an umbrella term for the music of urban industrial societies not classed as other genres, in particular folk (which is rural, and in oral tradition) and classical (which is elite, and in written tradition); popular music embraces many genres; originally a hybrid of written and oral traditions, recording is now the primary means of dissemination; it is usually considered to be entertainment music, both in its songs and dances


Principle – An underlying basis for consistency in social and musical experience; in our course, we explore three principles of organization of musical experience [ Song, Dance, Ritual], and one of correlation [Genre]


Pseudo-individualization - Adorno's view of the consequence of standardization: a song with interchangeable parts has no organic relation, and the parts are more important than the whole; they do not contribute to it; consequently, they can be substituted at will, which means that they have no genuine or unique identity; thus a song constructed in this way cannot offer a genuinely unique or even distinctive experience, but only the illusion of individuality


Pulse – a(ny) regular motion in space or, especially, time; in music, a regular feeling of accent, the wave-like motion toward (and away from) a regular point of stress


Recontextualization/Context – in the simplest terms, “context” means the elements that surround (and affect) a particular action or situation; music has the (partial) power both to create [its own] context—playing the violin on a street corner transforms the space in part into a music-listening venue, like a concert hall, and to (become) recontextualize(d)—as when robber ballads and bawdy drinking songs become fitted with new words and turned into Christian hymns


Recorded tradition – dissemination of cultural ideas and knowledge through mechanical and electronic preservation of acoustic signals


Repertory — a body of songs or music pieces; may refer to specific communities (rural Quebéc, German cities, village brass bands), social groups (American teenagers, French Catholics, particular radio stations, jazz musicians), or individual performers (Céline Dion, Wynton Marsalis, Barney)


Rhythm – a broad term for the kinds of animating connection between parts of a piece of music, a painting, poem, or dance


Ritual – A principle of musical experience, in which the time is organized to enact a social value or myth; see also Song, Dance 


‘Sell-America-music’ – see Make America Musical/Sell America Music 


Section – a coherent portion of song structure, usually (though not invariably) repeated; with rare exceptions, at least 8 measures long, and usually not more than 16; types include verse, chorus, and bridge; introductions and endings (or codas) do not usually function as sections, because they cannot be repeated


Social Action – Action directed toward or based on other people’s interests, ideas, experiences; in other words, all action


Social Class – a (large) grouping of people, based on shared experiences and interests, typically economic; the kinds of classes in a society and their relation to each other is called ‘class structure,’ and is a fundamental dimension of the organization of a particular society 


Social Time – Time, as experienced in a way that can be shared with others; the ways in which what we experience as distinct individuals is nonetheless similar or even identical


Social Values – see Values 


Society – the structures and processes shared by large groups of people, in order (more or less) to realize their common values through institutions


Song - A principle of musical experience, in which the time is organized in conjunction with (or patterned on) the syllables of speech; see also Dance, Ritual 


Standardization – Adorno’s idea that popular songs are mass-produced, like automobile parts, and must adhere to rigid constructive recipes, in content as well as structure; typically, the part is more interesting than the whole, and is weakly connected to it; the parts are in effect interchangeable


Stereotype/cliché—a belief founded on irresponsible generalization and underexamined presupposition


Structure – the type and order of sections that constitute a particular song


Subculture – a group within a society that shares the general value system, but has evolved some distinctive values of their own, based on social indexes such as age, occupation, religion, or political conviction 


Synchronization – the coordination of activities in time, especially the rhythmical coordination of activities in (and through) musical performance and listening. To anthropologist Edward G. Hall, most forms of collective interaction between people involve synchronization, usually unconscious.


Tone – within tolerances defined by social convention, a particular rate of acoustic vibration, used as a music note in music; what makes a note “the same” when sung by child, played on the piano, or sounded by a cell phone ring


Tradition – in music, the (more or less) consistent features passed from one generation to the next; typical features of tradition include performance conventions (lit stage, evening, darkened hall), structures ( verse-chorus [popular music], improvised solos[jazz]); see also oral, recorded, written tradition(s)


Tune Family – in musics based in oral tradition, a (large) group of variants and versions of performances with overlapping (but not identical) melodic and textual phrases


Urban Industrial Society – sustains itself through division of labour, mass production, and a decision-making based in educated urban centres


Values (also called Social Values) – “general notions of the what is good and desirable”; values differ from beliefs in their typically broader acceptance, and independence from subgroups or subcultures ; they are typically unconsciously learned (e.g., no one can recall when they were taught that life is sacred or selfishness is bad), and subject to directly contradictory interpretations (both sides of the abortion and capital punishment debates are acting from the value that ‘life is sacred’)


Variants/variation – respectively, different performances or passages of a song with some features the same, and some different; a key element in many kinds of musical thinking, and in historical & cultural musical change


Verse – a section usually defined by one or more of: different words but same melody every time; one voice instead of many; non-repetitious words, with the main narrative unfolding in successive verses
Written tradition – dissemination through written or printed texts, which van be reproduced by performers as scripts, or read; see oral tradition