Knowra Tonal music Tonal music Music organized by relationships among pitches, especially the sense of stability and attraction created by a tonal center. Chords and melodies gain direction from their roles in a key.
Tonic (music) : The pitch or chord that serves as the principal point of rest in a tonal key. It is the tonal center toward which other pitches and chords are heard as moving.
Musical scale : An ordered collection of pitches used as a basis for melody and harmony. Tonal music commonly draws its pitch relationships from major and minor scales.
Renaissance music : European art music from roughly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, marked by polyphony and evolving harmonic practice. Its late repertory shows practices that helped prepare the shift toward tonal organization.
Atonality : Music that does not establish a governing tonal center in the conventional major-minor sense. It rejects the central pitch hierarchy that defines tonal music.
Diatonic harmony : Harmony built chiefly from the notes of a major or minor scale. Its chords establish many of the characteristic relationships within a key.
Major scale : A seven-note scale with the interval pattern whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Its pattern underlies major keys and their characteristic harmonic relations.
Baroque music : European music from about 1600 to 1750, spanning the consolidation of major-minor tonality. Composers of this period established key-centered procedures across many genres.
Modal music : Music organized around modes, pitch collections with characteristic interval patterns and tonal centers. Modal organization can center pitches without using major-minor functional harmony.
Dominant (music) : The fifth scale degree and the chord built on it, commonly creating an expectation of resolution to the tonic. Its tension makes the tonal center sound especially decisive when reached.
Minor scale : A family of seven-note scales associated with minor tonality, including natural, harmonic, and melodic forms. Its variants support minor-key melodies and the leading-tone pull toward tonic.
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