Page:Music Notation and Terminology - 1921.djvu/98



178. The four elements commonly attributed to music (in the order of their development) are: Rhythm, Melody, and Timbre (or tone-color).

179. Rhythm is the regular recurrence of accent. In music it is more specifically the regular recurrence of groups of accented and non-accented beats (or pulses)— according to some specified measure-system. Since rhythm implies continuity, there must usually be at least two such measure groups in order to make musical rhythm possible. (See p. 44, Sec. 97.)

180. A melody is a succession of single tones of various pitches so arranged that the effect of the whole will be unified, coherent, and pleasing to the ear.

The soprano part of hymn-tunes and other simple harmonized compositions is often referred to as "the melody."

181. Harmony is the science of chord construction and combination.

The term harmony refers to tones sounding simultaneously, i.e., to chords, as differentiated from tones sounding consecutively, as in melody. The word harmony may therefore be applied to any group of tones of different pitches sounded as a chord, although specifically we usually refer to a succession of such chords when we speak of "harmony." It is possible to use the same combination of tones in either melody or harmony; in fact these two elements as applied to modern music have developed together and the style of present-day melody is directly based upon the development that has recently taken place in harmonic construction.

Harmony (as contrasted with counterpoint) first began to be an important factor in music about 1600 A.D., i.e., at the time when opera and oratorio came into existence, when form was established, and when our modern major and minor scales were adopted. Before this practically all music was composed on a contrapuntal basis.

182. Timbre is that peculiar quality of sound which enables one to distinguish a tone produced by one instrument (or