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As you learn more about music in Year 3 and 4, you will need to know a number of key musical terms.

Below is a glossary of these words that you can come back to when you need.

Adagio - At a slow speed.
Allegro - At a brisk speed.
Crescendo - Gradually getting louder.
Decrescendo - Gradually getting quieter.
Forte - A dynamic marking telling you to play loudly.
Legato - Smooth playing.
Melody and accompaniment - A melodic tune accompanied by another line of music.
Piano - A dynamic marking telling you to play quietly.
Pitch - How high or low a note is.
Staccato - Short and spiky playing, the opposite of legato.
Tempo - The speed of the music.
Texture - The overall effect of how melody, harmony and rhythm are combined in a piece of music.

Beat - A basic unit of time marking out the speed at which the music is played.
Clef - A symbol found at the beginning of a line of music to show how high or low the notes are.
Crotchet - A one beat note.
Dot notation - Visual symbols used to represent musical notes and chords.
Major - A type of key with a set pattern of notes (the major scale).
Minim - A two beat note.
Minor - A type of key with a set pattern of notes (the minor scale).
Octave - An interval or gap of eight notes.
Pentatonic - A five note scale.
Quartet - A musical group of four players.
Quavers - A half beat note.
Rest - A period of silence.
Score - A written piece of music using notation.
Stave - A set of five horizontal lines and four spaces on which musical notes are written.
Time signatures - Two numbers situated next to the clef. The top number tells you how many beats are contained in each bar, the bottom number tells you what type of notes they are.

Baroque - Music written between c.1600 and c.1750. Periods and eras of music overlap.
Classical - Music written between c.1750 and c.1830. Periods and eras of music overlap.
Duet - A piece played or sung by two performers.
Echo - The repeat of a phrase.
Improvising - Creating music in real-time, on the spot.
Partner songs - Songs with two (or more) complete melodies that can be sung separately, but go together because they are the same length and follow the same harmony.
Question and answer - Two distinct phrases which operate like a conversation, with the second phrase answering the first.
Rounds - A song in which singers perform the same melody but at staggered starting points, producing overlapping harmony.
Solo - Music played by one player.
Trio - A musical group of three players.
Tuned instruments - Instruments that can produce different notes such as a xylophone, chime bars, glockenspiel, hand bells, violin, trumpet, flute, cello, piano.
Unison - Playing or singing the same notes together, at the same pitch.
Untuned percussion - Instruments that makes a unpitched sound when hit, shaken or scraped, such as a woodblock, maracas, guiro, cymbal, drum.