POLYPHONY • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Polyphony

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/pəlˈɪfəni/ Listen

noun

Polyphony n.

Multiplicity of sounds, as in the reverberations of an echo.

Plurality of sounds and articulations expressed by the same vocal sign.

(Mus.) Composition in mutually related, equally important parts which share the melody among them; contrapuntal composition; opposed to homophony, in which the melody is given to one part only, the others filling out the harmony. See Counterpoint.

See images of 'Polyphony'

Etymology of 'Polyphony'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Polyphony" Quotes from Famous Books

... which he instructed me); he himself could barely span a tenth. He made frequent use of the pedal, much more frequently than is indicated in his compositions. His reading of the scores of Handel and Gluck and the fugues of Bach was unique, inasmuch as he put a polyphony and spirit into the former which gave the works ...

— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven

... of Latin verses without a subject. But this standard form, whatever its merits may be in combining progressive technique with musical sense, has no connexion with the true classical types of fugue, though it played an interesting part in the renaissance of polyphony during the growth of the sonata style, and even gave rise to valuable works of art (e.g. the fugues in Haydn's quartets, op. 20). One of its rules was that every fugue should have a stretto. This rule, like most of the others, is absolutely without classical ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... absolute, but conditioned by EINSTEIN'S theory of relativity. The ancillary industries, each moving in its orbit, whether jurassic or botulistic, must be placed on a contractual basis with liberty of preferential retaliation. Thus the whole industrial polyphony is linked up by enharmonic modulations, and thrombosis—or, at any rate, conglucination—of the central ganglia of commerce is reduced ...

— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various