MusicWords

Musicians, not to outdone by scientists with their PhysicsWords, have also a few polysyllabic terms:

• Dissonance and Consonance: Description of the quality of an chord. Dissonant chords grate on the ear, and produce a nice strong effect when they resolve to a consonance. Consonance is a nice, stable sound, and most pieces end on a consonance.
• Enharmonic: When a note (such as B-flat) is symbolized with another note with (nearly) the same pitch (such as A-sharp).
• Augmented-sixth Chords: These are a special kind of second-classification chords (these are the ones that resolve to the dominant) that in many keys include both sharps and flats (unless they are Enharmonically Spelled Augmented Sixth Chords [say that three times fast!])
• Tritone, the 'Devil's interval', which used to mean just the augmented 4th, but now also includes the diminished 5th. Is used often now, because dissonance resolving to consonance is popular.

There are also the seven 'white key' Modes, which were used in ancient music. If you play a scale all on the white keys of a piano, you get each mode depending on which note you start on. The names are:

• Ionian, starting on C, which sounds like the regular major scale
• Dorian, on D, a precursor to our minor scale, but with one less flat / one more sharp
• Phrygian, on E, another precursor to minor, but with one more flat / one less sharp.
• Lydian, start on F, precursor to Major, with a extra sharp / short a flat.
• Mixolydian, start on G, also precursor to Major, with a extra flat / short a sharp
• Aeolian, on A, sounds like natural minor.

and finally, the dreaded:

• Locrian, on B, never used by ancient composers because the root to the dominant is a 'tritone' (actually a diminished 5th), and so it sounds completely wrong.

RadRob 4/16/2003

TopicHumor

(correlates: GrayGreenGap, ScienceWiki, CogDis, ...)