SWR Music

Ballet (as a musical genre) refers to orchestral music written to accompany choreographed dance on stage. It prioritizes clear tempi, strongly articulated rhythms, and memorable leitmotifs to support narrative, character, and movement.

Classical music is the notated art-music tradition of Europe and its global descendants, characterized by durable forms, carefully codified harmony and counterpoint, and a literate score-based practice.

Hard bop is a mid‑1950s subgenre of jazz that extends bebop’s virtuosic improvisation while bringing back a more explicitly African‑American groove.

Jazz is an improvisation-centered music tradition that emerged from African American communities in the early 20th century. It blends blues feeling, ragtime syncopation, European harmonic practice, and brass band instrumentation into a flexible, conversational art.

A sonata is a multi-movement work for one or a few instruments that developed as a principal vehicle of instrumental expression in European art music.

Speech is a non-music recording category focused on intelligible spoken language rather than melody, harmony, or meter. It encompasses political addresses, public announcements, news bulletins, commemorations, and other forms of formal oratory captured as audio.

A symphony is a large-scale composition for orchestra, typically cast in multiple movements that contrast in tempo, key, and character. In the Classical era, the most common layout was four movements: a fast opening movement (often in sonata form), a slow movement, a dance-like movement (minuet or…

Western classical is the notated art-music tradition that developed in Europe from medieval Christian chant into the large-scale secular and sacred forms of the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and modern eras. It is characterized by staff notation, evolving systems of modality and tonality, and forms…