A&R (artists and repertoire):

Personnel of a record company who discover and cultivate new talent and find material for artists to perform.

analog recording:

A technique for storing audio signals for playback. Unlike digital recording, which converts sound waves into numbers, the sound waves in an analog recording are stored as a physical texture on a phonograph record or a fluctuation in the strength of a magnetic recording.

arranger:

A person who adapts (or arranges) the melody and chords to songs to exploit the capabilities and instrumental resources of a particular musical ensemble.

ballad:

A type of song in which a series of verses telling a story, often about a historical event or personal tragedy, are sung to a repeating melody (this sort of musical form is called strophic).

ballad opera:

A form of musical theater popular in the eighteenth century that used spoken English dialogue and songs.

banjo:

An African American invention; it was developed from stringed instruments common in the Senegambia region.

beat:

The underlying pulse of a song or piece of music; a unit of rhythmic measure in music.

bel canto:

A technique used by opera singers that emphasizes breath control, a fluid and relaxed voice, and the use of subtle variations in pitch and rhythmic phrasing for dramatic effect.

blues:

A genre of music originating principally from the field hollers and work songs of rural blacks in the southern United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

bossa nova (“new trend”):

A cool, sophisticated style of Brazilian music that became popular in United States during the early 1960s, eventually spawning hit songs such as “The Girl from Ipanema” (1964).

broadside:

A large sheet of paper on which ballads were published; the predecessor of sheet music.

call-and-response:

A musical statement by a singer or instrumentalist that is answered by other singers or instrumentalists.

chorus:

A repeating section within a song consisting of a fixed melody and lyric that is repeated exactly each time that it occurs, typically following one or more verses.

form:

The musical structure of a piece of music; its basic building blocks and the ways they are combined.

groove:

A term that evokes the channeled flow of “swinging” or “funky” or “phat” rhythms.

habanera:

An African-influenced variant of the European country-dance tradition that swept the United States and Europe in the 1880s. The characteristic habanera rhythm—an eight-beat pattern divided 3–3–2—influenced late nineteenth-century ragtime music.

hook:

A memorable musical phrase or riff.

lyricist:

A person who supplies the poetic text (lyrics) to a piece of vocal music; not necessarily the composer.

lyrics:

The words of a song.

pleasure garden:

A forerunner of today’s theme parks; one of the main venues for the dissemination of printed songs by professional composers in England between 1650 and 1850.

polyrhythmic textures:

Textures in which many rhythms are going on at the same time.

producer:

An agent who convinces the board of directors of a record company to back a particular project, shaping the development of new talent and often intervening directly in the recording process.

riff:

A simple, repeating melodic idea or pattern that generates rhythmic momentum.

rumba:

An Afro-Cuban dance tat became popular in the United States during the early 1930s.

salsa:

A rumba-based style pioneered by Cuban and Puerto Rican migrants in New York City in the 1960s. The stars of salsamusic include the great singer Celia Cruz and bandleader Tito Puente.

samba:

A Brazilian dance style strongly rooted in African music.

strophic:

A song form that employs the same music for each poetic unit in the lyrics.

tempo:

“Time” in Italian; the rate at which a musical composition proceeds, regulated by the speed of the beats or pulse to which it is performed.

texture:

A musical element that describes the relationship of various parts of a musical performance or composition.

timbre:

The quality of a sound, sometimes called “tone color.”

verse:

A group of lines of poetic text, often rhyming, that usually exhibit regularly recurring metric patterns.