Multilingual Music Glossary

# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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We are currently providing explanations for 2484 terms from 12 languages, including English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Latin…

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Please note: a music glossary is just like a dictionary. It contains explanations to musical terms. If you are looking for a piece, please go here instead: search tunes.

Some random terms

  • cakewalk Traditional, syncopated African-American form of music and dance which originated among slaves in the Southern United States.
  • open-hole A flute finger key with a perforated center, allowing the use of techniques such as pitch bending or glissando.
  • Eingang [German] An introduction, preface or prelude.
  • binary measure A measure containing two beats.
  • libretto [Italian] A “little book” that contains the complete text of an opera, oratorio, and so forth.
  • jazz A musical style created mainly by African-Americans in the early twentieth century that blended elements drawn from African musics with the popular and art traditions of the West.
  • bossa nova [Portuguese] Brazilian dance related to the samba, popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
  • ionian In the system of modes, the ionian mode is the one based on C; therefore, it is the modern major scale.
  • minimalist music Contemporary musical style featuring the repetition of short melodic, rhythmic and harmonic patterns with little variation.
  • measure The smallest metrical divisions of a composition, containing a fixed number of beats, the first of which bears an accent.
  • bolero [Spanish] A moderately slow Spanish dance in 3/4 time.
  • doppel [German] “Double”.
  • harmonic Any integer multiple of the fundamental frequency of a tone. The fundamental frequency is considered to be the first harmonic; doubling its frequency you obtain the second harmonic, tripling it you obtain the third harmonic, and so on.
  • difference tone A lower tone that is heard when two higher notes are played in such a way that the frequency of the difference tone is the difference of the frequencies of the other two notes.
  • part song A vocal composition for two or more voices, usually unaccompanied.