A Guide to Orchestra Music

The Elements of Music:

The raw materials of music are rhythm, melody and harmony.

Rhythm

Rhythm refers to the controlled movement of music in time. The duration of tones, the number of times they are repeated, and the pattern with which they are sounded determines the rhythm of a musical passage. Rhythm is concerned with the duration of pitches and regulates all the relationships within a composition. We naturally hear sounds with a regular pulse, strong and weak beats, and respond to rhythm with our reflexes or physical movements.

Musical Time

Musical time is usually organized with a basic unit of length known as a beat; some beats are stronger than others and are referred to as accented beats. Beats are perceived in groups known as bars or measures, each containing a fixed number of beats.

Syncopation

Syncopation refers to an intentional upset of the normal accent; the accent, instead of falling on a strong beat of the measure, is shifted to a weak beat (for example, normal accent: ONE, two three; syncopation: one TWO three). It is one of the popular means for avoiding monotonous rhythmic patterns.

Melody

Melody is the element of music that the listener usually remembers. A melody is a succession of tones perceived by the mind as a unit, an impression of a conscious arrangement. The listener doesn't respond to tones separately, but in relation to each other within a pattern.

Harmony

Harmony pertains to the movement and relationship of intervals and chords, hence the familiar do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do scale. The tones of an interval may be sounded in succession or simultaneously. A chord is a combination of three or more tones that constitute a single unit of harmony. The melody sounds above the supporting chords that provide the harmony.

Dissonance

Dissonance is responsible for the tension in music. It's easier to think of dissonance as restlessness and activity, consonance as relaxation and fulfillment. The dissonant chord creates tension and the consonant chord resolves it. Each complements the other, both are necessary.

Key

A key refers to a group of related tones with a common center or tonic. The tones of the key serve as basic material for a given composition. When citing a composition in D major, the piece is based upon the family of tones that revolve around and gravitate to the tonic D. This relation to a central tone is known as tonality. When speaking of "atonal" music, one is referring to music that avoids a tonal center.

Scale

A scale is a series of tones arranged in consecutive order, ascending or descending.
The key signature at the beginning of a piece declares the number of sharps or flats that prevail in that particular composition, establishing what key it is in (C major has no sharps or flats, G major has one sharp, F major has one flat, etc.). These major and minor keys comprise the standard Western harmonic system.

Modulation

The contrast between keys and the movement from one key to another is an essential element of musical structure and is known as modulation. It is one of the most important sources of variety in music.

Musical Notation

Reading music is like reading another language. Musical notation is the result of an evolution that reaches back to antiquity. Through the centuries it adapts to the new systems of musical thought.

Procedure of Variation

The procedure of variation is one of the oldest performing principles that have endured without interruption from the earliest known music to the present day. Variation is a technique by which successive statements of a theme are altered or presented in altered settings. The theme itself may vary in length. How the themes are modified depends on the type of music, classical, non-classical, jazz, popular, blues, etc. and the performers, instrumental or vocal, involved.

Arrangement

Arrangement can either mean the alteration of a composition from one medium to another, such as a popular song arranged for solo piano, or a string quartet (two violins, viola and cello) arranged for a full orchestra, or the simplification or elaboration of a piece, with or without a change of medium. Although the term transcription is often used interchangeably with arrangement, it tends to imply a more literal transference, rather than a re-composition or paraphrase reflecting the arranger's choices, not the composer's.