Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Homophony began by appearing in sacred music, replacing polyphony and monophony as the dominant form, but spread to secular music, for which it is one of the standard forms today. Composers known for their homophonic work during the Baroque period include Claudio Monteverdi, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Polyphony (/ p ə ˈ l ɪ f ə n i / pə-LIF-ə-nee) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ().
An intuitively understandable example for a polyphonic instrument is a (classical) piano, on which the player plays different melody lines with the left and the right hand - depending on music style and composition, these may be musically tightly interrelated or may even be totally unrelated to each other, like in parts of Jazz music.
Although in music instruction certain styles or repertoires of music are often identified with one of these descriptions this is basically added music [clarification needed] (for example, Gregorian chant is described as monophonic, Bach Chorales are described as homophonic and fugues as polyphonic), many composers use more than one type of ...
Traditional sub-Saharan African harmony is a music theory of harmony in sub-Saharan African music based on the principles of homophonic parallelism (chords based around a leading melody that follow its rhythm and contour), homophonic polyphony (independent parts moving together), counter-melody (secondary melody) and ostinato-variation (variations based on a repeated theme).
Thus, one phrase might be soloistic, the next set in imitative polyphony, the next homophonic, the next an instrumental tutti, and so on. Alternatively, a chorus could declaim a text homophonically while violins played in an entirely different style at the same time – in a different register, in a different location in the church, all ...
Unlike Arcadelt and Verdelot, Willaert preferred the complex textures of polyphonic language, thus his madrigals were like motets, although he varied the compositional textures, between homophonic and polyphonic passages, to highlight the text of the stanzas; for verse, Willaert preferred the sonnets of Petrarch.
The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. According to the English musicologist Margaret Bent , "a piece of music in several parts with words" is as precise a definition of the motet as will serve from the 13th to the late 16th century and beyond. [ 1 ]