Four Pieces Of Music Research Paper

The Pieces of Music
When listening to music there are four main elements that the listener should become familiar with. These elements are rhythm, melody, harmony, and tone color. These factors along with the creation of structure and musical texture make up the music that we listen to on a day to day basis. Without these musical features music would not be as complex and dynamic as it has grown to be. Depending on how they are arranged and utilized determines what we take away for music after we have listened to it. What we bring to the music is a significant factor as well. Considering all of these components, how we listen to music and how we should listen to music are distinctively different.
Historians believe that when music was first created thousands of years ago, it was merely a simple beat (Copland 1957). This element of music soon evolved into what we all recognize now as rhythm. It wasn’t until about 1150 C.E. that musical rhythm was formally written down. Even the systems that we have adopted today aren’t flawless, yet they do fulfill the need of the performer and the composer. The elementary “measured
Unlike the natural forthcoming of rhythm and melodies harmony was an amazing intellectual conception of man. The earliest form of harmony was called “organum” in which we would harmonize the same melody in intervals of sixths or thirds above or below the melody. Soon harmony evolved to two separate melodies being played simultaneously in opposite directions. This was called “descant”. The next development was “Faux-bourdon” or “false-bass”. Instead of say with the crude sounds of fourth and fifth intervals faux-bourdon introduced the forbidden tones of the third and sixths (Leonard 2010). This later changed the course of harmonic use introducing basic chords known as triads. The combination of harmony and melodies created the color of the