MUS-L 121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Vibrato
Day 1: Critical Listening: Terms and Tools for Concert
• Music Appreciation
• Tools for judging a performance and write reviews
• Music elements, structure and guitar effects
• Listening Skills
o Does the performer draw you into music? If not, why?
▪ Am I interested? If not, why?
o Visual images or moods and feelings?
o Which details about the performer (holding the guitar, posture, etc)?
• Musical Elements
o Rhythm, Melody, Harmony, Expression, Structure
▪ Rhythm
• Breathe, heartbeats, walking
• Aspects of rhythm: beat and tempo
▪ Beat
• When you clap your hands or tap your foot to music, you’re
responding to its beats
• Beat is a regular, recurrent pulsation
• BPM = beats per minute
▪ Tempo
• Tempo is the speed of a beat
• The more BPM you have, the faster a song is
• Fast or Slow Tempo = General feeling about music
• Markings and Titles (Terminology within Tempo)
o Largo - very slow, broad
o Andante - Moderately slow or walking pace
o Allegro - Fast
o Presto - Very fast
▪ Harmony
• Chords (C, D, E, F, etc…)
• Mixture of various sounds
▪ Melody
• Singable aspect of music
• Speech like (first kind) - one note, not jumping between
notes
• Leaps (second kinds) - jump around to different notes
▪ Melody + Harmony
• Harmony: Behind the melody
• Guitar styles
• Imagine
• Somewhere over the rainbow
▪ Structure: Movements
• Parts of a piece or song
• Movement - each movement is separated from the other by
a brief pause
