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music festivals

(Encyclopedia)music festivals, series of performances separate from the normal concert season and often, but not always, organized around an idea or theme. Music festivals usually are held annually in the summer, s...

computer music

(Encyclopedia)computer music, term used to describe music composed or performed with the aid of a computer. The first substantial piece of music composed on a computer was the Illiac Suite (1956) by the avant-garde...

Arabian music

(Encyclopedia)Arabian music, classical musical tradition of the Islamic peoples of Arabia, the Fertile Crescent, and North Africa. Little is known of Arabian music before the Hegira (a.d. 622), but afterward unde...

church music

(Encyclopedia)church music. 1 Music intended for performance as part of services of worship. With few exceptions, music is essential to the ritual of every religion; the singing of prayers and portions of Scripture...

Byzantine music

(Encyclopedia)Byzantine music, the music of the Byzantine Empire composed to Greek texts as ceremonial, festival, or church music. Long thought to be only a further development of ancient Greek music, Byzantine mus...

gospel music

(Encyclopedia)gospel music, American religious musical form that owes much of its origin to the Christian conversion of West Africans enslaved in the American South. Gospel music partly evolved from the songs slave...

Greek music

(Encyclopedia)Greek music, the music of the ancient and modern inhabitants of Greece. Dormant for nearly two thousand years, Greek music underwent a musical rebirth in the 19th cent. with the works of the opera c...

rock music

(Encyclopedia)rock music, type of music originating in the United States in the mid-1950s and increasingly popular throughout much of the world. A turning point in rock music occurred in the mid-1970s in the ...

aleatory music

(Encyclopedia)aleatory music āˈlēətôrˌē [key] [Lat. alea=dice game], music in which elements traditionally determined by the composer are determined either by a process of random selection chosen by the comp...

serial music

(Encyclopedia)serial music, the body of compositions whose fundamental syntactical reference is a particular ordering (called series or row) of the twelve pitch classes—C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B—t...