AS Vocal Music - Stylistic Features

Style = Rockabilly. An early form of rock & roll that is a fusion of black American R&B music and white American country music.

Rhythm
- Pick-up rhythms in the acoustic guitar in the verses
- Stop time chords
- Backbeat emphasis
- Fast 4/4 tempo throughout

Melody and Word Setting
- Limited amount of notes in the melody
- Hoarse, declamatory R&B-style of singing
- **** vocables
- Use of blue notes
- Mainly syllabic word setting
- Disjunct melody

Harmony and Tonality
- 12-bar blues based harmony
- Walking bass
- Primary chords used
- Country flattened third chord of C major
- No modulations; E major tonality throughout 

Structure
- Verse-Chorus form
- Short introduction section
- 2 instrumentals with guitar solos

Texture
- Melody dominated homophony
- Parallel 4ths in electric guitar
- Heterophony between lead guitar and double bass

Instrumentation
- Country double bass used
- Electric guitar uses plectrum
- Slap bass technique
- Double bass is amplified
- Echo effect on the electric guitar
- Use of two guitars 

Style = neo-classical. A new, modern interpretation of the Classical music era. Influences include: Baroque, Classical, Medieval, Russian Orthodox Church and Jazz music.

Rhythm and Metre
- Hocket chants
- Syncopation
-  Frequent changes in metre

Melody and Word Setting
- Monotone melodies
- Repeated notes
- Repeated words
- Angular melodies
- Alto line has narrow range
- Generally syllabic
- Avoids obvious opportunities for word painting

Harmony and Tonality
- False relations create dissonance
- Static harmonies
- Non-functional
- Bitonality in the opening
- Unrelated keys
- Some tonal characteristics

Texture
- Voices often in homophony
- Imitation at bar 150 is reminiscent of Handel
- Lacks top lines
- Some counterpoint

Context
- Non-lithurgical
- Words from Psalms
- No violin, viola or clarinet 

Style = Renaissance ballett madrigal. For domestic use of SSATB solo singers.

Rhythm and Metre
- Lively, dance-like dotted rhythms
- Hemiola approaching a cadence
- 3/4 simple triple time
- Fast quaver runs in the bass and tenor lines

Melody and Word Setting
- Clichéd Elizabethan text about love shepherds and dance
- Word painting used to show happiness
- Alto has little melodic interest
- Textless 'fa-la-la' melodies

Harmony and Tonality
-  Modal and diatonic influences
- Consonant chords
- Functional progressions
- No key signature but clearly G major
- Related key modulations (C and D major)
- Chords are either in root position or first inversion
- Unprepared tritones between the outer parts
- Suspensions in the alto line

Texture
- Highly contrapuntal nature
- Often voices sing in homophony
- Counterpoint used
- Imitation used

Structure
- Binary form
- Fa-la-la refrains 

Style = popular 1960s progressive rock song. From a concept album about loneliness; experimental features.

Rhythm and Metre
- Some conventional rock rhythms in the drums
- Freedom in the fills
- Some syncopation
- Use of triplets and sextuplets in the drum part
- Semiquaver figure in the vocal line

Melody and Word Setting
- Diatonic and major vocal line
- Pentatonic feel in B section vocals
- Generally syllabic
- Melisma semiquaver figure
- Range of a 10th
- Repeated melodic ideas
- Sequence used
- 'Push and pull' vocal line

Harmony and Tonality
- Strong mixolydian mode implications
- Circle of 5ths progression
- Stepwise descending bass line
- B section alternates between tonic and dominant
- Bass avoids walking bass pattern

Texture
- Mainly melody dominated homophony
- Heterophony between bass and piano left hand
- Orchestral sections create textural variety

Structure
- Ternary
- Aleatoric orchestral links = experimental
- Lennon's material is strophic
- Asymmetrical verse lengths
- Contrast between A and B sections 

Resources
- Alarm clock sample
- 40-piece orchestra
- Piano and acoustic guitar play simple, chordal parts
- Concerto like chord in piano on the words "Albert hall"
- 'Live' feel with audience samples added
- Lennon's sections are bleak and sardonic, in contrast to McCartney's up-beat section. 

Style = Classical era of music. 'Canzonet' (little song) words taken from poem by Anne Hunter. Intended for domestic use by the amateur market.

Harmony and Tonality
- Bright A major tonality
- Modulation to the dominant (E)
- Diatonic harmonies
- Cadential 6, 4 ends the piano introduction
- Functional harmonies
- Occasional suspensions and appoggiaturas
- Broken chord accompaniment
- First four bars of vocal line are an antecedent

Melody and Word Setting
- Generally syllabic
- Vocal range of an octave (E to E)
- Conjunct melodies
- Melodies sometimes outline the tonic triad 

Texture
- Mainly melody dominated homophony
- Accompaniment supports and often doubles the vocal line

Structure
- Strophic
- Periodic phrasing

Resources
- Piano forte becoming increasingly popular
- Natural rhythm of the text is kept to 

- This question is out of ten so make sure you make at least ten points

- You are allowed to write in bullet points but they must still be full, explanatory sentences

- Begin with a short sentence about what style the piece is

- Use critical (musical) vocabulary

- You are being assessed on QWC (Quality of Written Communication)

- You should spend half the time on this question that you spend on the comparison question.

- I advise learning 10+ points from these cards for each piece so you can simply recite them quickly in fuller sentences; the next question may require more thinking time and less remembering lists of facts.

- I apologise if anyone is planning on answering the instrumental stylistic features but the styles for these pieces are, I find, much clearer. The pieces are also much shorter (other than Symphony of Psalms) I recommend doing the vocal pieces for the essay questions.

Good luck