| ragtime | A written piano music, duple in meter, moderate in tempo. The left hand marks the beat while the right hand plays a syncopated melody.
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| chromaticism (chromatic, adj.) | Use of tones not belonging in a particular major or minor scale.
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| cakewalk | A plantation dance with syncopated melodies, including the short-LONG-short figure that became characteristic of ragtime.
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| finale | In music theater, the final scene of an act or of the show.
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| piano roll | A perforated paper roll on which pianists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recorded their performances.
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| player piano | An instrument for playing piano rolls by pumping pedals to force air through the holes in a piano roll as it wound over a tracker bar.
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| staccato | Short, detached.
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| two-step or fox-trot | A popular American dance derived from ragtime. The meter is duple, the rhythm syncopated, the tempo moderate.
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| Tin Pan Alley | The name for the popular-music publishing industry from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Also, the streets in New York City where the publishing houses were located.
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| song plugger | A music store employee who demonstrated popular music for customers by playing it on the piano and sometimes by singing it as well.
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| verse-chorus form | A common song form in which verses relating the song’s story alternate with a tuneful chorus, or refrain.
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| barbershop style | Unaccompanied (traditionally male) voices singing popular songs in close harmony.
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| modulate | To change systematically from one key to another, usually by using one or more tones common to each key as a pivot.
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| American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) | Organization formed in 1914 to ensure that music creators would receive fair compensation for public performance of their works.
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| Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) | A performing rights licensing agency formed in 1940 to represent a broader range of popular and alternative music than ASCAP seemed to serve.
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