Elements of music

"There is very little dispute about the principal constituent elements of music, though experts will differ on the precise definitions of each aspect. Most central are 'pitch' (or melody) and 'rhythm'...next in importance only to pitch and rhythm is 'timbre', the characteristic qualities of tone."

"Just as parameters within a culture are distinguished from one another because they are governed by somewhat different constraints, so it is with the parameters of music: melody, harmony, timbre, etc., are more or less independent variables."

"Melody, rhythm, timbre, harmony, and the like."

"Melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, tessitura, timbre, tempo, meter, texture, and perhaps others"

"Two aspects of each of these parameters should be taken into consideration: the quality of each parameter at any given moment and the way in which each parameter changes as the music progresses"

"Musical research since the late twentieth century has given greater consideration to certain social and embodied aspects of music."

"Any element belonging to the total musical fact can be isolated, or taken as a strategic variable of musical production."

"Sound is a minimal condition of the musical fact."

"Writing of her own Igbo music, the Nigerian musicologist Chinyere Nwachukwu maintains that the 'concept of music nkwa combines singing, playing musical instruments, and dancing into one act'. Whatever concept of 'music' is held by members of western society, it is highly improbable that, apart from forward-looking scholars and composers, it will contain all three elements. Nkwa in fact is not 'music' but a wider affective channel that is closer to the karimojong mode of expression than to western practice. The point of interest here is that Nwachukwu feels constrained to use the erroneous term 'music': not because she is producing a 'musical dissertation,' but because the 'one act' the Igbos perform has no equivalent in the English language. By forcing the Igbo concept into the Procrustean bed of western conceptualization, she is in effect surrendering to the dominance of western ideas—or at least to the dominance of the English language! How different things would have been if the Igbo tongue had attained the same 'universality' as English!."