B

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B

The key of B, or in the German musical system, B-flat.

badinerie

Badinerie (French: teasing), indicates a piece of music of light-hearted character. The best known badinerie is the lively last movement of Bach's Suite in B minor for flute, strings and continuo.

bagatelle

A short light or whimsical piece, usually written for piano.

Bagpipe

The bagpipe is an ancient instrument, at least in its most primitive form, and is still found in a number of countries. It is a reed instrument, with the reed sounded by air expressed from a leather bag. It generally makes use of a single pipe that can be fingered to produce different notes, with additional drones, pipes that produce single notes, a marked feature of bagpipe music and of its imitations for other instruments. The sophisticated and more versatile French musette, a bagpipe operated by bellows, gave its name to a baroque dance suite movement, marked, usually in the bass, by the continuing sound of a drone, a repeated single note.

ballad

A simple song. A song that tells a story. In popular music, usually a love song in a slow tempo.

ballet

A theatrical dance form with a story, sets, and music.

band

An instrumental ensemble, usually made up of wind and percussion instruments and no string instruments.

bar

In written Western music the bar-line came to be used, a vertical line through the stave, to mark metrical units or bars (= measures). By the later 17th century the bar-line had come to be used immediately preceding a strong beat, so that a bar came to begin normally with an accented note. The double bar or double bar-line marks the end of a section or piece.

Barcarolle

A barcarolle is a boating-song, generally used to describe the boating-songs of gondoliers in Venice, imitated by composers in songs and instrumental pieces in the 19th century. Chopin wrote one such Barcarolle for piano, and Mendelssohn provided four shorter piano pieces of this kind. At the end of the century and in the early 20th century the French composer Gabriel Fauré wrote thirteen Barcarolles. There is a particularly well known barcarolle in Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann (Les contes d'Hoffmann).

baritone

A low male singing voice (between tenor and bass).

Baroque Period

The musical era roughly from 1600 to 1750.

bass

“Low.” The lowest male singing voice. The lowest part of the music. The lowest instrument. In the violin family, the lowest instrument.

bass clef

The F clef falling on the fourth line of the staff.

Bassoon

The bassoon is a double-reed wind instrument (= German: Fagott; Italian: fagotto). It is the bass of the woodwind section in the modern orchestra, which can be augmented by the use of a double bassoon of lower range.

basso continuo

“Continuous Bass.” In the baroque era, an accompaniment improvised from a bass line, usually with adjacent numbers to indicate the harmony.

battaglia

“Battle.” A composition that imitates the sounds of battle and martial music.

beat

The beat or pulse in a piece of music is the regular rhythmic pattern of the music. Each bar should start with a strong beat and each bar should end with a weak beat. These may be known as the down-beat (strong, at the beginning of a bar) and the up-beat (weak, at the end of a bar). Up and down describe the gestures of a conductor, whose preparatory up-beat is of even greater importance to players than his down-beat.

bequadro

A natural sign.

berceuse

A lullaby.

bewegt

Bewegt (German: agitated) is used as a tempo indication meaning something the same as the Italian 'agitato', although mässig bewegt is used as the equivalent of allegro moderato.

binary form

A compositional form in which an initial section is followed by a contrasting section (AB). See song forms.

bitonal

The use of two different keys, or tonic centers at the same time.

bolero

The bolero is a Spanish dance, popular in Paris in the time of Chopin and in Latin America. One of the best known examples of the dance in art music is Ravel's ballet music Boléro, music of mounting intensity described by the composer as an orchestrated crescendo.

borrowed chord

A chord from a key other than the current one.

bourreé

A bourrée is a duple-rhythm French dance sometimes found in the baroque dance suite, where it was later placed after the sarabande, with other lighter additional dances.

bouts

In the violin and guitar families, the curves in the ribs (sides) of the instrument, especially the C-shaped inward curves that form the waist.

bow

The device used in the string instrument family composed of a wooden stick with a pointed end, strung with horsehair. The bow is drawn across the strings to set them vibrating.

brass

The brass section of the orchestra includes metal instruments where the sound is produced by forcing air through a cup-shaped or conical mouthpiece. The brass section usually consists of trumpets, trombones and tuba and French horns.

brio

Brio (Italian: vivacity, fire or energy) appears as an instruction to performers as, for example, in allegro con brio, fast with brilliance and fire, an indication used on a number of occasions by Beethoven.