Glossary

Discover and understand the music of Bristol TN/VA through Basic Musical Terms, Genres of Music, Instruments and Related Terms defined below.


Basic Musical Terms

A cappella - To perform a choral piece without instrumental accompaniment

Chord - A group of three or more notes played or sung together, making harmony.  A broken chord is a chord whose notes are played one at a time.

Harmony - The combination of two or more musical notes played or sung in a chord.

Key - The tonal center of a piece of music.

Major and minor - Two general types of keys, scales, or chords.  Major keys are based on major scales and usually have an upbeat or happy sound.  Minor keys are based on minor scales and usually sound more somber than major scales.

Measure - Small divisions in a piece of music.  Measures are indicated by barlines and contain the number of beats shown on the top of the time signature.

Melody - The succession of notes that gives a piece of music its tune.  The melody line is the most prominent line of music.  It is the line you hum or remember most vividly.

Pitch - The vibration frequency of a sound, or the highness or lowness of a musical tone.  A high pitch has more vibrations per second than a low pitch.  When you match your voice to a tone, you are matching the vibration frequency of the tone, so we say you are “on pitch” (or in tune).  If your voice is above or below the tone, you are “off pitch” (or out of tune).   Pitch, Tone and Note are sometimes used interchangeably.

Rhythm - The way movement is expressed in musical time.  The time values of notes grouped in different combinations give an infinite variety of rhythmic movement to music. When you clap the time values of the notes in a song, you are clapping the song’s rhythm.

Tempo - The rate of speed of a musical piece. 


Genres of Music

Americana - Americana is an amalgam of roots musics formed by the confluence of the shared and varied traditions that make up the American musical ethos; specifically those sounds that are merged from folk, country, rhythm & blues, rock & roll and other external influential styles.

Bluegrass - A type of folk music that originated in the southern United States, typically played on banjos and guitars and characterized by rapid tempos and jazzlike improvisation.

Celtic - A broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic people of Western Europe, often applied to the music of Ireland and Scotland

Country - Country music (or country and Western) is a blend of traditional and popular musical forms traditionally found in the Southern United States and the Canadian Maritimes that evolved rapidly in the 1920s.The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s when the earlier term hillbilly music came to be seen as denigrating.  The term country music is used today to describe many styles and subgenres.

Country Rock - A sub-genre of popular music, formed from the fusion of rock with country. The term is generally used to refer to the wave of rock musicians who began to record country-flavored records in the late 1960s and early 1970s, continuing with cult status and occasional mainstream success to the present day.

Folk - Musical traditions associated with rural cultures that are accepted in the community and passed through oral transmission.  The existence of variants is a commonly cited feature, as is its ever-changing nature.

“Hillbilly” - Hillbilly music was at one time considered an acceptable label for what is now known as country music. The label, coined in 1925 by country pianist Al Hopkins, persisted until the 1950s; however, some artists and fans found the term offensive even in its heyday.

Honky Tonk - Another type of stripped down and raw music with a variety of moods and a basic ensemble of guitar, bass, dobro or steel guitar (and later) drums became popular, especially among poor white southerners.

“Newgrass” - A major subgenres of bluegrass music distinguished by:  instrumentation, frequently including electric instruments, drums, piano, and more; songs imported or styles imitated from other musical genres like jazz, rock and others; non-traditional chord progressions; and lengthy "jam band"-style improvisation.

“Old-Time” - A genre of North American folk music, with roots in the folk music of many countries, including England, Scotland, Ireland and countries in Africa. It developed along with various North American folk dances, encompassing ballads and other types of folk songs. It is played on acoustic instruments, generally centering on a combination of fiddle and plucked string instruments (most often the guitar and banjo).

Piedmont Blues - Refers primarily to a guitar style, the Piedmont fingerstyle, which is characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger, occasionally others. The result is comparable in sound to ragtime or stride piano styles.

Rockabilly - Rockabilly is one of the earliest styles of rock and roll music, and emerged in the early 1950s. The term rockabilly is a portmanteau of rock (from rock 'n' roll) and hillbilly, the latter a reference to the country music (often called hillbilly music in the 1940s and 1950s) that contributed strongly to the style's development.

Southerm Gospel - Southern Gospel music, sometimes called quartet music, is music that is written to express either personal or a communal belief regarding Christian life, as well as (in terms of the varying music styles) to give a Christian alternative to mainstream secular music


Instrument Related

Autoharp - The autoharp is a musical stringed instrument having a series of chord bars attached to dampers which, when depressed, mute all the strings other than those that form the desired chord. Despite its name, the autoharp is not a harp at all, but a chorded zither.

Banjo - The banjo is a stringed instrument with, typically, four or five strings, which vibrate a membrane of plastic material or animal hide stretched over a circular frame. Primitive forms of the instrument were fashioned by enslaved Africans in Colonial America, adapted from several African instruments.

Carter Scratch - A style of fingerstyle guitar named for Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family's distinctive style of rhythm guitar in which the melody is played on the bass strings, while rhythm strumming continues above, on the treble strings. With the technique Carter "helped to turn the guitar into a lead instrument."

Clawhammer banjo - Clawhammer is a highly rhythmic banjo playing style and common component of American old-time music, consisting primarily of a down-picking style.

Dobro - Dobro is a registered trademark used for a particular design of resonator guitar; however, in common language, it refers to any resonator guitar, or specifically one with a single inverted resonator.

Fiddle - Generic term for any string instrument played with a bow. Colloquially, ‘fiddle’ is often used for a member of the violin family

Flat Picking - Flatpicking is a technique for playing a guitar using a guitar pick (also called a plectrum) held between two or three fingers to strike the strings. Flatpicking was developed when guitarists began arranging old-time American fiddle tunes on the guitar, expanding the instrument's traditional role of rhythm guitar accompaniment with an occasional run on the bass strings.

Guitar - The guitar is a plucked string instrument, played either with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number but sometimes more, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with either nylon or steel strings

Luthier - Someone who makes or repairs stringed instruments

Mandolin - A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family (plucked, or strummed). The mandolin soundboard (the top) comes in many shapes—but generally round or teardrop-shaped, sometimes with scrolls or other projections. A mandolin may have f-holes, or a single round or oval sound hole. Early mandolins had six double courses of gut strings, tuned similarly to lutes, and plucked with the fingertips. Modern mandolins commonly have four double courses (four pairs) of metal strings, which are plucked with a plectrum or pick.

Mountain Dulcimer - A fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings. It is native to the Appalachian region of the United States. The body extends the length of the fingerboard, and its fretting is generally diatonic.

Scruggs Style banjo - Scruggs style is the most common style of playing the banjo in bluegrass music. It is a fingerpicking method, also known as three-finger style, consisting of an up-picking motion by the fingers and a down-picking motion by the thumb.


Related

Accoustic - Acoustic music comprises music that solely or primarily uses instruments which produce sound through entirely acoustic means, as opposed to electric or electronic means.

Ballads - A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century

Cloggging - Clogging is a type of folk dance with roots in traditional European dancing, early African-American dance, and traditional Cherokee dance in which the dancer's footwear is used musically by striking the heel, the toe, or both in unison against a floor or each other to create audible percussive rhythms.

Contra Dance - Contra dance (also contradance, contra-dance and other variant spellings) refers to several partnered folk dance styles in which couples dance in two facing lines of indefinite length.

High Lonesome - The high-pitch vocal style has been characterized as the "high lonesome sound".

Jam Session - A jam session is a musical act where musicians play (i.e. "jam") by improvising without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements.  Jam sessions are often used to develop new material, find suitable arrangements, or simply as a social gathering and communal practice session.

Nashville Number System - An informal method of transcribing music by denoting the scale degree on which a chord is built.

Nashville Sound - The Nashville sound arose during the late 1950s replacing elements of the popular honky tonk style (fiddles, steel guitar, nasal lead vocals) with "smooth" elements from 1950s pop music (string sections, background vocals, crooning lead vocals), and using "slick" production, and pop music structures.  Nashville's pop song structure became more pronounced and it morphed into what was called "Countrypolitan". Countrypolitan was aimed straight at mainstream markets and it sold well throughout the later 1960s into the early 1970s.

Shape Note Singing - Shape notes are a music notation designed to facilitate congregational and community singing. Shape-note singing began in the late 1700's as a teaching device in American singing schools in the Northeastern United States. Shapes were added to the note heads in written music to help singers find pitches within major and minor scales without the use of more complex information found in key signatures on the staff.

Square Dance - Dance for sets of four couples standing in square formation. The most popular type of U.S. folk dance, it derived from the quadrille and was originally called a square dance to distinguish it from the contra, or longways, dance (for a double line of couples) and the round dance (for a circle of couples). The U.S. square dance progresses through specific patterns called or sung out to the dancers by a caller and accompanied by lively music played on instruments such as fiddle, banjo, accordion, guitar, and piano.

Victor Orthophonic Victrola  - The Victor Orthophonic Victrola first demonstrated publicly in 1925, was the first consumer phonograph designed specifically to play "electrically" recorded disks. The combination was recognized instantly as a major step forward in sound reproduction.