Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

Soundtrack is music created to accompany and enhance visual media such as film, television, and video games. It includes original scores (instrumental or vocal music composed specifically for the picture) and, at times, curated compilations of pre-existing songs. Stylistically, soundtrack is a meta-genre that can encompass orchestral symphonic writing, jazz, electronic and synth-driven textures, choral forces, popular song, and experimental sound design. Its defining trait is functional storytelling: themes, motifs, harmony, rhythm, and timbre are shaped by narrative needs, character psychology, pacing, and editing. Common features include leitmotifs for characters or ideas, modular cues that can be edited to picture, dynamic orchestration for dramatic range, and production approaches that sit well under dialogue and sound effects. Because it must synchronize to picture, soundtrack often uses clear dramatic arcs, tempo maps, and hit points.

Neoclassicism in music is a 20th‑century movement that revived forms, genres, and aesthetics from the Baroque and Classical eras, but reframed them with modern harmony, rhythm, and orchestration. It emphasizes clarity, balance, objectivity, and contrapuntal craft, often rejecting late‑Romantic excess while retaining a tonal or modal center enriched by dissonance, bitonality, and crisp rhythmic drive. Typical hallmarks include neobaroque dance suites, neoclassical sonatas and concerti, chamber‑oriented scoring, clean textures, and a dry, anti‑rhetorical performance style.

Orchestral music refers to compositions written for an orchestra—a large ensemble typically built around a string section (violins, violas, cellos, double basses), complemented by woodwinds, brass, percussion, and often harp, keyboard, or other auxiliary instruments. A conductor coordinates the ensemble, shaping balance, phrasing, and expression. The style emphasizes coloristic timbre combinations, dynamic range from the softest pianissimo to explosive tuttis, and textures that can shift seamlessly between transparent chamber-like writing and monumental masses of sound. Orchestral writing underpins concert genres such as symphonies, overtures, and tone poems, as well as opera, ballet, and modern film and game scores. While orchestral writing evolved across centuries, its core craft centers on melody, counterpoint, harmony, register, and orchestration—the art of assigning musical ideas to instruments to achieve clarity, contrast, and narrative impact.

A cantata is a multi-movement vocal composition with instrumental accompaniment, typically written for one or more soloists, choir, and a continuo or small orchestra. It may be sacred (for liturgical use) or secular (for courtly or domestic performance). Emerging in early 17th-century Italy, the cantata adopts the expressive recitative–aria contrast of opera on a smaller scale. Baroque church cantatas—especially in the German Lutheran tradition—often weave congregational chorales, contrapuntal choruses, and solo arias into a coherent cycle tied to the liturgical calendar. Stylistically, cantatas use tonal Baroque harmony, basso continuo, and movement types such as recitativo secco/accompagnato, da capo arias, choruses, and sinfonias. The genre later broadened into concert and scenic cantatas in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Latin American classical music is the concert-music tradition cultivated across the Americas south of (and including parts of) Mexico, drawing on European art-music forms while integrating Indigenous, Afro‑Latin, and criollo musical languages. It encompasses sacred and secular repertoires from the colonial baroque through romantic nationalism, modernism, and contemporary experimental currents. Stylistically, it blends European harmony, counterpoint, and orchestral practice with regional rhythmic cells (sesquiáltera/hemiola, 3‑2/2‑3 clave, malambo, huapango), modal and pentatonic inflections from Andean and Mesoamerican sources, and timbral colors inspired by local instruments and dances. The result ranges from exuberant, rhythmically vital symphonic music to intimate guitar works and choral music suffused with local idioms.

A requiem is a musical setting of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead (Missa pro defunctis). Historically rooted in Latin liturgy, it sets movements such as the Introit, Kyrie, (historically) the Sequence Dies irae, Offertory, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Communion, and often includes additional responsories like Libera me and In paradisum. While the earliest requiems were monophonic chants, the genre became a showcase for polyphonic and later symphonic choral writing. Renaissance composers wrote austere, modal settings; Classical and Romantic composers expanded the forces and dramatic scope; and 20th–21st century composers reimagined the form with new languages, from neo-modal and impressionistic harmonies to avant‑garde sonorities. Today, requiems appear both in liturgy and as concert works, symbolizing collective mourning, remembrance, and spiritual reflection.