four-part harmony
1
5.5
- noun
- Specialized
:
armonía a cuatro voces
- I grew up and grew away and went to churches more inclined to deliver a historically correct rendition of a medieval chant than "I Walked in the Garden Alone" in four-part harmony.
- sing four-part harmony
Examples
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From now on, we're gonna sing, uh, four-part harmony.
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"I grew up hearing people sing four-part harmonies," he says, "casually."
Blog text (19) -
They hit the mark on their four-part harmonies, their solos, their high notes.
Blog text (11) -
Whorley and Conklin present a multiple viewpoint system of four-part harmony to evaluate and improve an iterative random walk technique.
Academic text (2018) -
During the concert, the choir showcased their beautiful four-part harmony, captivating the audience with its rich sound.
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The ensemble rehearsed diligently to perfect their four-part harmony before the big performance.
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In traditional choral music, four-part harmony includes the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices, each contributing to the overall richness.
How Many Parts
- Specialized
1
5.5
1
4.3
Surface Forms
Morphology
four-part + harmony
The compound is directly compositional: 'four-part' means consisting of four parts and 'harmony' refers to a musical arrangement of voices or notes, so a learner who knows both words can infer it denotes harmony arranged in four parts/voices. This is a straightforward, cross-linguistically common descriptive pattern in music terminology, making the meaning immediately recoverable from the constituents.
Etymology
Four-part harmony comes from the simple idea of four separate musical lines singing together. Each of the four parts, soprano, alto, tenor and bass, sings its own tune and together they make a full sound, so the phrase means music made of four independent 'voices'.