Romania Clasa a X-a Music Education
Chapters: 5
1. Musical language
Keys, scales and rhythm
- Music Theory Basics: The Language of Music – Music theory explains how music is built. Pitch is how high or low a note is; the seven note names repeat every octave, where the frequency doubles. Rhythm is how sounds are placed in time over a steady beat, counted in note values and grouped into bars by a time signature. Scales follow step patterns (major: T T S T T T S), and chords stack notes such as the 1st, 3rd and 5th. Dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture and form complete the elements of music.
2. Performing
Singing and playing
- Music Performance: Playing Solo and in an Ensemble – Performing music means playing or singing a piece for listeners. A good performance is accurate (right notes, right rhythm), keeps a steady tempo, uses dynamics and phrasing to show feeling, and fits the style of the music. In an ensemble, players also listen to each other, balance their volume and follow cues. Good preparation is slow, careful practice in small chunks, then speeding up and performing for others.
3. Listening: romantic music
Romantic genres
- Romanticism – Romanticism was a movement in literature, art and music from about 1780 to 1850. It reacted against the Age of Reason's strict rules and against ugly, crowded factory towns. Romantics valued nature, especially wild and 'sublime' nature, strong personal feeling, the free individual, imagination and dreams, the past and folk culture. Key figures include Wordsworth, Keats, Goethe, Pushkin, Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo, the painters Turner and Friedrich, and composers such as Chopin and Schubert.
4. Listening: late 19th and 20th century
Impressionism and 20th-century trends
- Impressionism – Impressionism was an art movement that began in France in the 1860s–1870s. Painters such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt painted outdoors, quickly, to catch the changing effects of light and the atmosphere of one moment. They used bright, pure colours placed side by side in visible brushstrokes, coloured shadows and scenes of modern everyday life. Their first group show in Paris in 1874 was mocked by critics, who took the name from Monet's painting 'Impression, Sunrise'. Impressionism opened the way to Post-Impressionism (Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin) and modern art, and the word was also used for music (Debussy) and literature.
5. Music and other arts
Opera as combined art
- Musical Theatre – Musical theatre tells a story by combining spoken scenes (the book), songs (the score), dance, sets and lights. Characters sing when feelings grow too big for speech. Common song types include the opening number, the 'I want' song, duets, ensemble numbers, comedy songs, showstoppers and reprises. Opera is the older relative: usually sung all the way through. Composers such as Kurt Weill, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Jason Robert Brown each shaped the style in different ways.