song
-
What is a song?
A song is a musical piece performed by a single voice, with or without accompaniment. It combines speech and music to heighten the effect of words, allowing them to be rendered with projection and passion.
Musical form depends on the arrangement of structural units successively in time. A melody consists of phrases with repetition, contrast, or variation. Coherence may be achieved through a motive, figure, or rhythmic pattern.
Folk songs are typically sung unaccompanied or with a single instrument and learned by ear. Art songs are performed by trained singers, accompanied by piano or instrumental ensemble, with written notes resistant to alteration. Popular songs fall between folk and art songs in technical difficulty and musical structure.
5 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
What does 'vocal music' mean?
Vocal music includes genres for solo voice and combined voices, with or without instruments, featuring monophonic (single melody line) and polyphonic music (multiple simultaneous melodies). Western vocal music, preserved in staff notation, emphasizes the composer's interpretations of text through pitch, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, and articulation.
Performers reinterpret established art, while other cultures prioritize the performer's creative role, re-creating compositions. Folk songs, often with simple melodies, accompany activities, while art songs have complex melodies and sophisticated texts. The art song reflects music and literature, with composers sensitive to words and prosody.
4 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
How do songs use words and melodies together?
In vocal music, songs combine words and melodies to create an artistic expression. The melody, a sequence of notes with rhythmic and pitch patterns, serves as the song's most memorable aspect. Composers set text to a vocal melody, interpreting natural speech patterns, poetic feet, and qualitative or quantitative accents.
The relationship between the words and melody can vary. Simpler musical settings mirror the poem's nature, while imaginative composers use their art to embellish the text. The accompaniment's nature and role have evolved, ranging from providing minimal support to actively participating in the interpretation through emotional reinforcement or representation of external details. Ultimately, successful songs meld considerations of speech, inflection, and prosody into a satisfying melodic line.
7 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
What are some common forms or structures of songs?
Songs utilize various forms to organize their sections, providing structure and coherence. Common song structures include:
-
Strophic: In strophic form, verses or stanzas of text change while the music remains the same. This structure is common in hymns, folk songs, and ballads.
-
Ternary: This form consists of three parts (ABA), where the first section returns after a contrasting middle section. Ternary form is also known as song form or three-part form.
-
Rondo: This instrumental form is characterized by the initial statement and restatement of a particular melody or section, with contrasting material separating the various statements. Common rondo forms are ABACA (five-part) and ABACABA (seven-part).
-
Blues: Blues songs generally follow a 12-measure form and a three-line AAB stanza. The first two and a half measures are typically devoted to singing, with the last measure and a half consisting of an instrumental break.
6 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
-
How do different cultures use songs in their traditions?
Songs play diverse roles across cultures, serving as a means to express emotions, lighten work burdens, and preserve history. Cultures worldwide use songs in different ways, such as the gayap agricultural songs of Trinidad, Japanese min-yo, and Dominican plena.
In South America, music and dance intertwine, central to healing practices, with each community having preferred vocal sounds. Native American cultures believe their music originated in the time of creation, with songs, dances, and ceremonies given by the Creator and spirit beings. Work songs worldwide relieve boredom, maintain rhythm, and voice feelings about working conditions. Oral traditions use songs to navigate territories, praise figures, and explore social behaviors. Religious symbolism uses music to connect with the holy, with instruments holding symbolic meaning. While Western music emphasizes the composer, other cultures rely on the performer's creative role.
6 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
How has vocal music changed and developed over time?
Vocal music has undergone significant transformations, influenced by cultural shifts, technological advancements, and evolving artistic ideals.
In the Middle Ages, the church preserved musical performance traditions, while wandering minstrels contributed secular music. The Renaissance saw the rise of polyphony and early tonality, with secular music gaining prominence. The Baroque period emphasized solo voices and expressive harmony, leading to new forms like opera and cantata. The Classical era favored subtle dynamics and folk elements, while the Romantic age intensified these principles, highlighting virtuosity and expanding the symphony orchestra.
Modern music, dating from around World War I, embraces diverse techniques in jazz, rock, and electronic music, with technology playing a crucial role in composition and performance.
8 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.
song, piece of music performed by a single voice, with or without instrumental accompaniment. Works for several voices are called duets, trios, and so on; larger ensembles sing choral music. Speech and music have been combined from earliest times; music heightens the effect of words, allowing them to be rendered with a projection and passion that is difficult to attain in speech alone. Singing style differs both within and between cultures, often reflecting such variables as the ideals of social interaction, perceptions of the spirit world, and the degree to which a society uses writing as a principal means of communication. Some cultures value a relaxed, natural vocal quality, with loosely articulated lyrics, while others cultivate a highly trained, tense sound, with precisely enunciated words.
In Western music, folk song is customarily distinguished from art song. Folk songs are usually sung unaccompanied or with accompaniment provided by a single instrument—e.g., a guitar or a dulcimer. They are usually learned by ear and are infrequently written down; hence, they are susceptible to changes of notes and words through generations of oral transmission. Composers of most folk songs are unknown.
Art songs, by contrast, are intended for performance by professional, or at least carefully taught, singers, generally accompanied by piano or instrumental ensemble. The notes are written down, and notes and words are thereafter resistant to casual alteration. Popular songs stand midway between folk and art songs with regard to technical difficulty, complexity of the musical structure, and resistance to change.
" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">
Folk songs often accompany activities such as religious ceremonies, dancing, labour, or courting. Other folk songs tell stories; chief among these are narrative ballads and lyrics. Anglo-American ballads are action-oriented, often dealing with a tragic episode. Lyric songs are more emotion-oriented, more sentimental. In many cultures—both historical and contemporary—the singing of heroic epics is also an important tradition. Folk songs typically have relatively straightforward melodies, usually with only one or a few notes per syllable. The language tends to follow certain conventions and is often repetitive. In most cases music and words are easily understandable, but in some traditions a special register of language is used for singing, which renders performances only partially—if at all—comprehensible to the average listener.
Art songs in the European tradition are rarely connected with extramusical activities. Their texts tend to be sophisticated, their melodies often wide-ranging and complex. Art song, like classical music as a whole, is essentially an urban phenomenon, with origins in the medieval courts, colleges, cities, and churches. Twelfth-century trouvères and troubadours left a large corpus of melodies and sung verse; they were imitated throughout Europe. Melodies and poems are subtle and highly organized, the products of an aristocratic society. Manuscripts indicate no accompaniment; presumably it was improvised.
With the growth of polyphonic music in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, composers learned to assign the principal melody to a solo singer, with subsidiary melodies played on instruments. The technique of having one melody imitate a preceding one led by the 15th century to elaborate textures wherein the vocal line’s primacy was threatened; there followed a reaction in songs with the sparsest possible accompaniment, merely a few chords. These became widely popular, and by the 16th century careful declamation and audibility of text became again a central concern.
Seventeenth-century dramatic music saw further refinement of song style. Distinctions arose between recitative and aria, the former entirely word-oriented and free, with minimal chordal accompaniment, and the latter more virtuosic and melodically elaborate, with a richer, more varied accompaniment. Being musically more interesting, arias came to dominate opera, cantata, and oratorio, and in the 18th century relatively little attention was paid to solo song outside these genres. The songs of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn, for example, are not considered among their best works. Only in popular music did simple strophic (stanzaic) songs with keyboard accompaniment flourish.
The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.
SUBSCRIBE
In the early 19th century Franz Schubert’s songs excelled in dramatic realization and musical quality. Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and the other leading Romantic songwriters learned from Schubert not only the art of varying a strophic melody but also the potential significance of the accompaniment. Felix Mendelssohn ultimately elevated the accompaniment to the status of song in his Songs Without Words (1832–45; Lieder ohne Worte), a collection of textless pieces that evoke poetic imagery through the sound of the piano alone. In French song the works of composers such as Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy characteristically possess shifting, kaleidoscopic harmonies, influenced in part by the fluid accentual patterns of the language.
Later composers continued to explore the relation of voice to accompaniment and to expand the singer’s range of expression and technique, sometimes treating the voice instrumentally. George and Ira Gershwin, for instance, incorporated suggestions of scat singing—an improvisational jazz vocal technique that uses meaningless syllables to imitate the sound of instrumental solos—into their opera Porgy and Bess (1935). In the later 20th and the early 21st century, American vocalist and composer Bobby McFerrin was recognized for his extraordinary ability to imitate not only the sound of single instruments but also entire ensembles using only his voice. (See also chanson; lied; vocal music.)