Blog Assignment #2 - Jacob Rogers

Counterpoint - a lot of music majors read 'counterpoint' and think the restrictive pedagogic species counterpoint we all had to study Freshman year, which isn't not counterpoint, but is a narrow mode of studying it. Counterpoint to me is more a massive metaphor for the way two disparate bodies interact, whether that's melodic lines producing tonal harmony, a drummer and a bassist bouncing syncopation off of each other, dancers reacting and adapting to each others' movements. Its the study of the way things interact with different things, and how that relates to expression.
Form - another pretty universal term, but an important one. Form to me is whatever makes the structure of a piece of art function. In music its often used to refer to idiomatic tropes (12-bar blues, 32 bar song-form, sonata form) but in a broader sense its a means of thinking about how structural events are spaced out and paced.
Tonal Music - this is more of a pet peeve than anything, and something I hear people within my field mix up all the time too. Tonal and modal are not synonyms. Tonal and diatonic are not synonyms. In some bizarre turn, a lot of people seem to think that if music isn't atonal, than it is by default tonal, which isn't true at all. Tonality functions on specific hierarchical divisions of chordal weight, and pivots on the relationship of the V chord and the I chord. If it doesn't do that, if V resolving to I isn't the centerpiece of the whole piece, its probably not tonal music.

A word that plagues me, and has been a source of dissent for composers for generations, is honestly 'Classical Music'. The term bears a massive history of elitism and classism, racism, sexism, etc., and for most of the population calls to mind conservatism and antiquity. There are many 'classical' composers that I adore, but I see small interplay between much of their music and most of my music. Yet the idea of composed music has become so intrinsically chained to a very specific European tradition that its inescapable. To the point that I only know how to describe what I do to most people as classical music. Its a burden.
Also 'chamber music' but that's a different rant.