vocal music

contributors

• Bordes  (in  Charles Bordes (French composer))

  Bordes was a pupil of the composer César Franck. In 1890 he became chapelmaster of St. Gervais in Paris, which he made a centre of the study and practice of 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century vocal music. In 1894 Bordes, along with the organist Alexandre Guilmant and the composer Vincent d’Indy, founded in Paris the Schola Cantorum, a society that in 1896 became a school for church music...

• Ockeghem  (in  Jean de Ockeghem (Flemish composer))

  ...works include 14 masses, 10 motets, and 20 chansons. His work sounds richer than that of his predecessors Guillaume Dufay and John Dunstable; during Ockeghem’s era the instrumentally supported vocal lines of earlier music were gradually modified to make way for sonorous choral harmony. The bass range in Ockeghem’s compositions extends lower than in his predecessors’ music, and the tenor...

• Purcell  (in  Henry Purcell (English composer): Songs and independent instrumental compositions)

  To later ages Purcell was best known as a songwriter because so many of his songs were printed in his lifetime and were reprinted again and again after his death. The first evidence of his mastery as a composer, however, is an instrumental work—a series of fantasias (or “fancies”) for viols in three, four, five, six, and seven parts. The nine four-part fantasias all bear dates...

• Telemann  (in  Georg Philipp Telemann (German composer))

  ...composer of the late Baroque period, who wrote both sacred and secular music but was most admired for his church compositions, which ranged from small cantatas to large-scale works for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.

development

• Baroque era  (in  music: Considerations related to performance practice)

  The development of opera, oratorio, and the cantata gave a prominence to vocal music throughout the Baroque era (c. 1600–1750) that made it equal in importance to instrumental music, with which these forms were closely allied. But instrumental chamber and independent orchestral ensembles, as they exist today, also had their beginnings during this period. A highly significant development...

• Western music through modern period  (in  Western music: Monophonic liturgical chant;

  ...from the earlier practice of unmetred psalmody, was cultivated, particularly under the influence of the 4th-century Bishop Ambrose, who first attempted to codify the growing repertory of chants. This body of Milanese church music, therefore, came to be called Ambrosian chant. Somewhat later a unique style and repertory known as Mozarabic chant evolved in Spain, and in France the...

  in  Western music: Songs )

  The vocal counterpart of the keyboard character piece was the solo song with piano accompaniment. With the rise of the German romantic poetry of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and others, about the beginning of the 19th century, the German lied (“song”) flourished. After 1850, composers of other nations, especially France and Russia, also produced a song literature of universal appeal. A...

performance

• blues  (in  blues (music))

  Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are lyrical rather than narrative; blues singers are expressing feelings rather than telling stories. The emotion expressed is generally one of sadness or melancholy, often due to problems in love. To express this musically, blues performers use vocal techniques such as...

• choral music  (in  choral music (vocal music))

  music sung by a choir with two or more voices assigned to each part. Choral music is necessarily polyphonal—i.e., consisting of two or more autonomous vocal lines. It has a long history in European church music.

• mediums  (in  musical performance: Mediums of performance)

  ...extraordinarily various. Western technology has had a tremendous impact on the development of musical instruments and has thereby greatly expanded the means whereby music is made. Performance may be vocal, instrumental, or electronic. Vocal performance is the oldest and the primary influence for the development of all subsequent musical gestures and materials. Instrumental music began with the...

• opera  (in  opera (music))

  a staged drama set to music in its entirety, made up of vocal pieces with instrumental accompaniment and usually with orchestral overtures and interludes. In some operas the music is continuous throughout an act; in others it is broken up into discrete pieces, or “numbers,” separated either by recitative (a dramatic type of singing that approaches speech) or by spoken dialogue. This...

• ornamentation  (in  ornamentation (music))

  Vocal ornamentation in sacred music was opposed by medieval churchmen as detrimental to the purity of the chant. All that is known of early medieval ornamentation is that some notational signs signified ornaments and that the vocal trill was known from at least the 3rd century. The first notated dances, dating from the 13th century, show features of a purely instrumental style of ornamentation....

• Shakespearean plays  (in  Music in Shakespeare’s Plays (Shakespeare, William): The vocal music)

  The professional companies that put on plays in the public theatres worked with much-reduced musical resources. Normally, one boy actor could sing and perhaps play an instrument. Adult actors, especially those specializing in clown roles, sang as well. A special musical-comic genre, the jigg, was the particular domain of the great Shakespearean comedians Richard Tarlton and William Kempe. Jiggs...

• symphony  (in  symphony (music): The concept of symphony before c. 1750)

  From the mid-16th century, symphonia (and related spellings) is a term often found in titles in which it simply indicated ensemble music, whether for instruments with voices or either alone. A collection of madrigals published in Antwerp in 1585 is entitled Symphonia angelica . . . raccolta per Huberto Waelrant. Later notable examples are the Sacrae symphoniae of the...

• vocal instrumentation  (in  instrumentation (music): Vocal instrumentation)

  The largest quantity of literature in Western music has been written for the chorus. The choir, an instrument capable of great subtleties of colour, has been a favourite of composers for centuries. The range of most individual singing voices is rather limited. Choral singers, who usually have a limited amount of training, are capable of a range of about an octave and a fifth, which is...

traditions

• Central Asia  (in  Central Asian arts: Folk music)

  Vocal music may have greater rhythmic flexibility and melodic range, but in form it is almost always subordinated to the structure of the song text. Quatrains such as the rubai and charbaitai are the most prominent village verse forms, with the exception of the lundai, a couplet used by the nomadic Pashtuns of Afghanistan. In the urban oases, couplet forms based on the...

• India  (in  South Asian arts: South India)

  ...and might on occasion last half an hour or longer. It is followed by a composed piece in the same raga, set in a particular tala. In South Indian music all composed pieces are primarily for the voice and have lyrics. In North India, however, there are also some purely instrumental compositions, called gat and dhun. The emphasis on the composition varies in the different forms...

• Islam  (in  Islām (religion): Music;

  Instrumental music was forbidden by the orthodox in the formative stages of Islām. As for vocal music, its place was largely taken by a sophisticated and artistic form of the recitation of the Qurʾān known as tajwīd. Nevertheless, the Muslim princely courts generously patronized and cultivated music. Arab music was influenced by Persian and Greek music....

  in  Islamic arts: Aesthetic traditions )

  ...Islāmic music was principally an individual, soloistic art. Small ensembles were actually groups of soloists with the principal member, usually the singer, predominating. Being an essentially vocal music, it displayed many singing and vocal techniques, such as special vocal colour, guttural nasality, vibrato, and other stylistic ornaments. Although the music was based upon strict rules,...

• Japan  (in  Japanese music: Vocal music;

  In the poetry-oriented court life of Japan, secular vocal music would obviously be important. Many of the poems in classical collections seemed originally to have been song texts. One of the oldest secular song forms is saibara, which was first inspired by the singing of packtrain drivers. Among the new fads of Heian period vocal music (called...

  in  Japanese music: Biwa, vocal, and folk music )

  During the late 19th century the biwa-accompanied narratives enjoyed a revival. The blind-priest biwa (moso biwa) tradition had originally been divided into two schools named after the provinces in Kyushu from which they came, Chikuzen and Satsuma. The tradition declined...

• Korea  (in  Korean music: Vocal music)

  Vocal music is another important facet of the Korean tradition. One of the longest and rarest older forms is the kagok, which consists of 26 five-line solo songs and one duet. Accompaniments and interludes are provided by a small ensemble. Sijo is a classical three-line form of Korean poetry that also can be sung to...

• Oceanic  (in  Oceanic music and dance: Melanesia;

  ...is not the simultaneous flawless execution of music and intricate movements but, rather, the creation of a mass rhythmic environment that might be characterized as a visual extension of rhythm. If words are associated, they are repetitious and seem not to tell a story; they may even be unintelligible. Although the specific structure of any single dance tradition in Melanesia is not yet known,...

  in  Oceanic music and dance: Western archipelagoes )

  Before Western contact, music in Tuvalu was closely connected with social rank, religion, and magic. There are no detailed descriptions of dances; vocal styles included recitation in heightened speech and chant with drone polyphony (common to most of Polynesia) and triadic melodies resembling those of the Solomons. The Samoan emissaries of the London Missionary Society who converted the people...

• Southeast Asia  (in  Southeast Asian arts: Vocal music)

  The role of the voice in music making differs from that of European music in both concept and execution. Men’s and women’s voices are each not divided into high and low ranges but are used for their colour qualities. In the Javanese shadow play, for example, the narrator (dalang) assumes many singing and speaking qualities to depict different characters and...

• Alfred Schnittke (Russian composer)
• Anton Webern (Austrian composer)
• Arnold Schoenberg (American composer)
• Charles Ives (American composer)
• Ennin (Buddhist priest)
• Erik Satie (French composer)
• Giovanni Carlo Maria Clari (Italian composer)
• Johann Hermann Schein (German composer)
• Johannes Brahms (German composer)
• Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (French composer)
• Leonard Bernstein (American composer and conductor)
• Luigi Nono (Italian composer)
• Meredith Monk (American performance artist)
• Pierre Boulez (French composer and conductor)
• Richard Rodney Bennett (British composer)
• Sir Andrzej Panufnik (British composer and conductor)
• Sir Edward Elgar (English composer)
• Sir George Henschel (British musician)
• Sir Granville Bantock (English composer)
• Sir Lennox Berkeley (British composer)
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Austrian composer)

• choral music (vocal music)
• goliard (medieval poet)
• meistersinger
• minnesinger (German poet-musician)
• minstrel (entertainer)
• music
• opera (music)
• scop (medieval entertainer)
• singer-songwriters (music)
• singing (music)
• song (vocal music)
• the Orioles (American music group)
• the Staple Singers (American music group)
• troubadour (lyric artist)
• trouvère (French poet)
• vocal music
• wait (town watchman)