Chant & Polyphony

According to the All-Knowing Wikipedia:

In music, polyphony is one type of musical texture, where a texture is, generally speaking, the way that melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic aspects of a musical composition are combined to shape the overall sound and quality of the work. In particular, polyphony consists of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, which is called homophony.

Within the context of the Western musical tradition, the term polyphony is usually used to refer to music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Baroque forms such as fugue, which might be called polyphonic, are usually described instead as contrapuntal. Also, as opposed to the species terminology of counterpoint [clarification needed], polyphony was generally either "pitch-against-pitch" / "point-against-point" or "sustained-pitch" in one part with melismas of varying lengths in another. In all cases the conception was probably what Margaret Bent (1999) calls "dyadic counterpoint", with each part being written generally against one other part, with all parts modified if needed in the end. This point-against-point conception is opposed to "successive composition", where voices were written in an order with each new voice fitting into the whole so far constructed, which was previously assumed.

The term polyphony is also sometimes used more broadly, to describe any musical texture that is not monophonic. Such a perspective considers homophony as a sub-type of polyphony.


Ymar Sakar said...

Not all knowing, merely crowd sourced. Kings used to have advisers, because human knowledge was very broad and very deep.

Crowd sourcing provides the broadness, while excellent advisers who are experts, provided the deepness.

Tom said...

The All-Knowing Wikipedia has an interesting entry on irony as well:

Irony (from Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία (eirōneía), meaning "dissimulation, feigned ignorance"), in its broadest sense, is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or event in which what appears, on the surface, to be the case, differs radically from what is actually the case. Irony may be divided into categories such as verbal, dramatic, and situational.


Other forms, as identified by historian Connop Thirlwall, include dialectic and practical irony. ...

Verbal irony

According to A glossary of literary terms by Abrams and Hartman,

"Verbal irony is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker employs is sharply different from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed. The ironic statement usually involves the explicit expression of one attitude or evaluation, but with indications in the overall speech-situation that the speaker intends a very different, and often opposite, attitude or evaluation."


Grim said...

I like polyphony.

Ymar Sakar said...

Whether something is irony or not, has no effect on the truth I state.

I look at the bigger picture. Human knowledge is very broad, and there's a lot of small alleys people can be side tracked in.