Glossary of Musical Terms

Accompaniment  An additional musical part which supports the main voice or instrument. 
Beat  The basic regular pulse you feel in music. 
Body percussion  Using the body as an instrument to create sounds (e.g. clapping, stomping, snapping fingers). 
Brass  A family of wind instruments made from metal with cupped mouth pieces (e.g. trumpet, trombone, tube). 
Conductor  A person who stands at the front of a group of musicians (e.g. orchestra or choir) and directs the performance. 
Crescendo  Gradually getting louder. 
Diminuendo  Gradually getting quieter. 
Dynamics  The volume of sound – the loud or soft passages in a piece of music. 
Ensemble  A group of musicians that perform together. 
Forte  Loud. 
Glissando  Sliding from one note to another, taking in all the notes in between. 
Graphic Score  A way in which a piece of music can be written down using shapes, pictures and symbols. 
Harmony  The sound of two or more notes played/sung at the same time. 
Kodály rhythm names  The names for different rhythm values help learners to understand and say rhythms accurately. (Relates to the NYCoS Singing Games and Go for Bronze resources.) 
Kodály handsigns  Each pitch of the scale is given a solfa name and corresponding handsign to help learners understand the relationship between different pitches. (Relates to the NYCoS Singing Games and Go for Bronze resources) 
Legato  Notes are played or sung smoothly. 
Melody  Notes played one after the other to make a tune. 
Mezzo-forte  Moderately loud. 
Ostinato  A repeating pattern. 
Pentatonic Scale  A scale of five notes (do, re, mi, so, la). 
Percussion (tuned and untuned)  Instruments that are played by hitting, striking, shaking or scraping. Tuned percussion can play a range of notes at different pitches. Untuned percussion mostly have one pitch or sound. 
Piano  Soft (quiet). 
Pictorial rhythm notation  Pictures that show the rhythm of a song/rhyme. 
Pitch  The highness or lowness of a sound, i.e. higher or lower notes in a melody. 
Round  Singing in a round means harmony is created when each voice/group sings the same melody, beginning at different times. 
Rhythm  A pattern of sounds in time which can be long or short or of equal duration. 
Rhythm Stick Notation  The stems of notes used to write down rhythm. 
Soundscape  An atmosphere or environment created by sound. 
Stave  A set of five horizontal lines and four spaces that each represent a different pitch.
 
Staccato  Notes are short and detached. 
Strings  A family of instruments with strings that are plucked or bowed (e.g. violin, viola, cello). 
Structure  How the music is organised into different sections (e.g. verse, chorus or beginning, middle, end).
Binary form: in 2 sections (AB)
Ternary form: In 3 sections (ABA) 
Tempo  The speed of a piece of music. 
Texture  How many instruments or voices there are. The more instruments/voices, the thicker the texture. 
Timbre  The sound quality that causes different instruments to sound different from each other when they are playing the same note. 
Time signature  The top number tells you how many beats are in every bar. The bottom number tells you what kind of beat it is. 
Unison  Two or more instruments or voices playing/singing the same pitch at the same time. 
Woodwind  A family of wind instruments made from a long tube of wood or metal. Sound is created by blowing through a reed or across a small mouthpiece (e.g. clarinet, flute, oboe). 
World music  Different styles of music from around the world (e.g. Latin American, Indian, African).