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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...

Hindu music

(Encyclopedia)Hindu music. The music of India is entirely monodic. To Westerners it is the most accessible of all Asian musical cultures. Its tonal system divides the octave into 22 segments called srutis, not all ...

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...

program music

(Encyclopedia)program music Instrumental music of the 19th and 20th cent. that endeavors to arouse mental pictures or ideas in the thoughts of the listener—to tell a story, depict a scene, or impel a mood. Mousso...

popular music

(Encyclopedia)popular music: see country and western music; folk song; gospel music; jazz; rap music; rock music. ...