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1. Terminological history The Greek  orchḗstra was the place where the chorus danced ( orchḗsis, “dance”, and - tra, “place”), and more generally, the stage. Tacitus also attests to the term in the later Roman theater. The term was unknown in the Middle Ages. In the 17th century, most European languages transposed it to contemporary conditions, and it came to denote the space reserved for instrumentalists in the theater, concert hall, and more rarely church. For the musicologist Johann Mattheson, writing in 1713…

1. HistoryThe instruction provided in medieval universities in the  artes liberales included neither the practice nor the history of music, but only a mathematical theory of music (see Mathematics, musical) [3]. This  musica speculativa did not fade away until the Renaissance. But it is likely that the students and faculty at the universities engaged in informal vocal and instrumental musical performance since time immemorial. Before there were permanently employed university musicians, usually an upper-level student held the honorary post of  rector musices [3].O…

1. Concept, technology and economics The concept of music publishing is understood in essentially the same way in most European languages. Music publishing houses developed, in spite of specific problems of printing technology, alongside the book trade and the literary publishing business. Such a house is an enterprise devoted to the commercial reproduction and sale of musical texts: sheet music and musical scores, works of compositional theory, vocal and instrumental tutors, and general texts about music.Even before various printing technologies became widespread,…

1. ConceptThe terms “popular music” and “popular song,” abbreviated today to “pop,” were already current in the early modern period as derivations from the Latin  populus (People) – in English as in many other European languages, but not in German, where the cognate Pöbel always bore the derogatory connotation “mob.” Johann Gottfried Herder instead coined the term Volkslied as a translation of the English “popular song,” drawing a distinction between the low  Pöbel and the good  Volk: “ Volk [people/folk] does not mean the Pöbel [mob] of the streets, who never make song o…

1. TerminologyLike most European languages, English uses the metaphor of lightness to distinguish a particular spectrum of music from “art music” as “light music” (cf. French  musique légère, Italian  musica leggera, Spanish  música ligera, Russian  ljogkaya muzyka, etc.). In German, however, the term Unterhaltungsmusik (“music for entertainment”) became established instead in the second half of the 19th century. The choice of words to define this supposed antithesis to art music affects the perspective of any analysis.  Unterhaltung (“entertainment”) denotes a funct…

1. ConceptA score is a way of notating music to show all parts that play simultaneously (“partiture,” from the Latin  partire, “to divide,” “to separate”). The concept of the  partitura originated in Italy in the 16th century and spread across Europe. Compared to aural transmission or improvisation, the score made it easier to repeat, disseminate, and study long and complicated musical combinations. Symbolic notation (Notation, musical) depicts the progression of the parts horizontally along the stave, and the simultaneous…

1. TerminologyThe Greek  symphonia (concord of sounds, harmonious concert) was borrowed into English as “symphony,” as it was into all the European languages (German  Sinfonie,  Symphonie, rarely  Synphonie; Italian  sinfonia; French symphonie). This original sense was preserved even when “symphony” became a technical musical term in the 17th century, and ultimately became a genre descriptor in the late 18th.Prior to 1600, the term appeared in titles of printed musical works (Music, printing of) in a general sense of “concord,” applied both to voca…

1. Natural rhythms 1.1. DefinitionRhythm (from the Greek  rhythmós, “measured flow,” “symmetry”), the regular metrical movement or recurrence of a phenomenon, is a key element in the subdivision of time. It divides up astronomical, “natural” (e.g. seasons), physical (e.g. the pendulum), biological (e.g. cell division, heartbeat, breath), psychological (mental processes congruent to biorhythms), and cultural processes (see Periodicity). It also forms a fundamental structural element of complex cultural p…

1. Definition Periodicals fulfilled important functions in the social communication of early modern society as a growing medium (Media) situated between books and newspapers and in the context of increasing streams of news. Formally, periodicals differed from books in the greater currentness of their news (News, currentness of) and their periodicity; they differed from newspapers in their individual aspirations, expressed in programmatic language. The greater average length o…