musical passage
- noun
- /ˈmjuːzɪkəl ˈpæsɪdʒ/
- Specialized
:
pasaje musical
- The composer wrote a beautiful musical passage that captured the emotions of the scene perfectly.
Examples
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The student's ability to incorporate musical passages in an improvisatory fashion is the mark of an intelligent musician.
Academic text (1991) -
Though the musical passages had been shown to affect mood appropriately in a pilot study, no evidence was found that either elating or depressing music had an effect on optimism or pessimism.
Academic text (1995) -
Have the students walk in rhythm while singing and "air fingering" a musical passage.
Academic text (2001) -
Students can continue to form these constructions into daily habits by doing the same exercise with musical passages from the performance literature.
Academic text (2005) -
It's also common, however, for young popular musicians to thrive on listening carefully to work up exact imitative performances of more difficult musical passages.
Academic text (2007) -
The two acts in a Noh play are subdivided into a series of chanted rather than spoken musical passages.
Academic text (2013) -
A general music specialist can often encourage a sixth-grade class to "remember" a musical passage during a listening lesson in order to compare the passage to an occurrence later.
Academic text (1991) -
Experienced music teachers become adept at chunking and sequencing the reassembly of difficult musical passages as a means of solving complex performance problems.
Academic text (2011) -
To recall musical passages that contain more than nine notes, individual notes must be grouped, or "chunked," according to meter, harmony, and rhythmic patterning.
Academic text (2006) -
Stokes uses the example of the Italian conductor, Toscanini, who, during a rehearsal of Debussy's La Mer, was unable to iterate the effect he wanted from a musical passage.
Academic text (2014)
Synonyms
179
7.2
A single musical tune or clear sound frequency
149
2.8
A short part of a text or musical piece
146
1.8
A series of musical notes that form the main tune of a song
31
3.2
A short part taken from a larger book, song, or other work
12
5.6
A short group of notes that forms a musical idea
10
6.0
The first clear playing of a musical theme that other parts repeat
1
3.4
A short group of notes that sounds complete in a piece of music
1
4.5
A line of musical notes that forms the main tune
How Long
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a short section of a musical composition' is directly and compositionally derivable from 'musical' (relating to music) + 'passage' (a discrete excerpt). This simple adjective+noun combination follows standard semantic composition patterns and is cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily understand it.
Etymology
The phrase musical passage combines musical (music) and passage meaning a short 'part' or 'way'. Imagine walking through a house where each room has its own small tune — so a musical passage is a short, distinctive part of a larger piece of music.