Musical Composition & Performance Practice

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Abstractions about musical form, notation, instrumentation, articulation, stylistic periods, electronic production, and philosophical approaches to sound.

12 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Bachelor of Music — An undergraduate academic degree whose program makes advanced musical performance, composition, education, scholarship or technology a principal field of concentrated study.
• Bar (music) — A segment of notated music bounded by bar lines and normally containing the rhythmic duration specified by the prevailing meter.
• Cell (music) — A short musical idea that functions as a generative unit for repetition, variation, combination, or larger motivic construction.
• Electronic music — Music whose creation or performance constitutively uses electronic instruments, signal processing, circuitry or software to generate, transform, sequence or organize sound.
• Lyric setting — The alignment of a lyric’s syllables, stresses, meaning and emotional contour with musical meter, rhythm and phrasing.
• Music engraving — The exacting design and preparation of publishable music notation so simultaneous pitch, rhythm, text, articulation and layout relations remain readable, aligned and reproducible across pages and performers.
• Octoechos — The eight-mode organizational system that orders repertory, composition and liturgical rotation in Byzantine and related Christian chant traditions.
• Offstage instrument or choir part in classical music — Score and coordinate a sounding part for performers physically separated from the principal stage ensemble so location, acoustic attenuation, direction, timing, and dramatic source become compositional parameters.
• Piano quartet — A chamber ensemble or composition for piano and three other instruments, canonically violin, viola and cello.
• Portato — A bowed-string articulation that gently rearticulates successive notes while sustaining them within one connected bow stroke.
• Romantic music — A nineteenth-century Western art-music movement emphasizing expressive individuality, expanded form and harmony, programmatic association and heightened timbral drama.
• Sonic philosophy — A philosophical approach that takes sound, vibration and listening as models and media for thinking ontology, relation and becoming rather than treating sound only as an object.