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1. Frame of reference A significant number of the important composers of the 15th and 16th centuries were born in Wallonian/French-speaking and Flemish/Dutch-speaking areas now part of Belgium and northeastern France. Most of them were raised and educated there and spent their working lives there. “Franco-Flemish” is a more appropriate designation of the homeland and area of activity of these singers, musicians, and composers than the older term “Dutch.” It is not accidental that the latter term was…

1. DefinitionThe term “timbre” in music describes the difference between sounds of the same pitch and volume, either instrumental or vocal. In terms of semantics and emotions, timbre offers almost unlimited scope for variation. Timbres create “expression, [that is] the element of perceptual content that triggers emotional responses and judgments through direct effect, and thereby ascribes to the perceived things qualities that are not given as stimuli” (“Ausdruck, [also] dasjenige an Wahrnehmungs…

1. General sensesSee Quickness; Social acceleration; Time2. Music 2.1. ConceptAccording to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, writing to his father on October 25, 1777, tempo was “the most necessary and rigorous and crucial thing in music” (“das nothwendigste und härteste und die hauptsache in der Musique”) [1]. The Italian word tempo (from Latin  tempus, “time”) was borrowed into English and German in the early 18th century to denote the spirit and relative speed of music. The concept, which is multifaceted and eludes a simple definition, conveys the…

1. ConceptExecution (German Vortrag) as a term from rhetoric began to be taken up in musical lexicography and instrumental music tutors from the mid-18th century. In the first place, according to Johann Mattheson and Johann Joachim Quantz, the oratorical system was to be imitated in execution (Rhetoric 4.). The article on Vortrag contributed by Johann A.P. Schulz to Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (1774), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique (1767), and Daniel Gottlob Türk's Klavierschule (1789) added “expression” ( Ausdruck) to the co…

1. Term Improvisation (from the Latin  improvisus, “unforeseen”; ex improvisio, “without preparation”) in music denotes simultaneous invention and realization in sound. Already occasionally used in medieval music theory, the term was included in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1768 Dictionnaire de musique. However, it seems to have prevailed over other terms, such as “impromptu”, “fantasia”, “extemporization,” or “preludization,” only around the middle of the 19th century.Hartmut Möller 2. Concept and purposes Improvisation can be seen as a musical action, the resul…

1. Concept All currents of literature, music, and fine arts in western culture that are called “classical,” from the  Siglo de Oro in 16th/17th-century Spain to the 17th-century French  époque classique to Weimar Classicism (around 1800), developed in the early modern period. Three key factors go towards explaining this phenomenon.(1) The emergence of new, normative aesthetic and cultural canons that came to be called “classical” by later generations, sometimes even by contemporaries, was at first directly associated with a creative  rec…