Performing Arts - CLEP Humanities

The clarinet is a woodwind instrument, and produces sound like all woodwind instruments, by the player blowing through a reed and controlling the sound by opening and closing valves with his or her fingers. Every other instrument listed in some way uses a keyboard, or in the case of the organ, multiple keyboards.

Bluegrass is a form of folk music developed in the middle of the twentieth century, primarily in Appalachia. The musical form developed around string instruments, which were available and primarily used in square and barn dances in the region. The clarinet, a wind instrument, is the only instrument listed that is not a key element of bluegrass ensembles.

Jazz was born in nightclubs in cities throughout the south in the early twentieth century. A common problem for early jazz groups was an inability to be heard, and many advancements in amplifying sound were made because of jazz. As such, quieter acoustic string instruments like the mandolin never made a dent in jazz.

In the 1913 Paris Ballet season, the Russian artists Igor Stravinsky, a composer, and Vaslav Nijinsky, a choreographer, debuted the ballet The Rite of Spring. The extremely avant-garde nature of the piece nearly caused the audience to riot. Stravinsky's score played with every convention in music at the time, including rhythm, melody, and dissonance.

First developed in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the montage originally referred simply to the instant cut between two different shots to show their relationship. Eventually, the term was broadened to refer to a compilation of short scenes that are edited together quickly to collapse time.

A "tracking shot" gets its name from the track set up to move the camera, attached to a dolly, throughout a set. This allows the camera to follow a character or an object across a scene, or between multiple locations. Tracking shots are used to move between locations in films.

"Film noir" was an appellation given to certain Hollywood films of the 1940s and 50s by French critics at the time, only being used in America by critics decades laters. Called "melodramas" in their own publicity, these films grew out of hardboiled detective fiction, and featured an element of mystery, a detective character, criminal elements, and, usually, a femme fatale as the lead female character. The films were usually quite small, with storylines that took place in one city over a few days or weeks.

A "voiceover" generally refers to the spoken part in a film that is not said by a character on screen or a by any character seen in the film. Usually, voiceover is used as a form of narration, to explain or comment on the action of the film in a way the characters cannot. Voiceover is commonly found in documentaries as a way to tie the film's story together in absence of a traditional narrative.

A film reel is actually a series of photographs, called frames, with the time between them being much less than one second. A typical frame rate for a film is 24 frames per second, a rate which makes the many different images appear to the human eye as one continuous, moving image. A typical human eye can process 10 separate images per second, and a frame rate must exceed this by enough to look like a constant shot of action.

Alfred Hitchcock frequently featured characters pursuing a simple goal or object relentlessly in his films. However, what they were after was usually not important in the film's larger story by the time the film reached its conclusion. Hitchcock called such a device the "MacGuffin," a term he invented as well as helped to popularize.

A "wipe" transition occurs when a visible line moves across the screen to provide the cut between two different scenes. A director can have a number of reasons for using a wipe to edit a film. In particular, it creates movement inside of a shot, and can show the continuity or a contrast between two scenes.

After moving picture film was possible, the film still had to be shot in black and white. Fairly early on in movie history, many different companies tried to create a color film process. While many were made, by far the most successful, to the point of being a near monopoly from the 1920s to the 1950s, was the Technicolor process used by the company of the same name.

A cinematographer on a film shoot can be thought of as the head camera operator. On a large film, this means the cinematographer is in charge of placing all cameras, setting lighting appropriately, and physically filming the scenes. A cinematographer is as key to the look of a film as anyone else involved in the filmaking process.

Alvin Ailey was significant in the history of dance as being one of the first prominent African-American choreographers to lead his own dance company. Ailey significantly contributed to dance by fusing the then-current forms of Modern dance in the 1950s with African-American vernacular dancing. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gained the nickname "The Cultural Ambassador to the World."

Merce Cunningham followed in the footsteps of pioneering modern dance choreographers like Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan, pushing the boundaries of movement and form. One of his particular contributions was by constantly producing work by collaborating with various other artists. His most famous and long lasting partnership was with the avant-garde composer John Cage.

Casablanca, made in 1942, features a plot based around the intersection of various people who have found themselves in the eponymous Moroccan city thanks to the upheavals of World War II. Primarily focused on a romance between Humphrey Bogart's Rick and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa, the story includes many other storylines that touch the main plot. Casablanca is often listed as among the greatest films in polls of both critics and audiences.

A "pointe shoe" is a shoe that allows a dancer to stand directly on his or her toe, to create a light silhouette and perform various maneuvers. These are necessities in ballet, which desires its dancers to move seemingly effortlessly and beautifully. The "pointe shoe" and dancing "on pointe" is one of the features that distinguish ballet from other styles of dance.

Alignment describes harmonious, unbroken lines with arms and legs. Arabesque refers to standing on one leg and extending the other leg and both arms away from the body. A pas de deux involves dance sequences with two dancers. Spiral refers to a twisting movement, but does not mean that is it done on one leg; it is also not a French term.

Frederic Chopin was a Polish-born composer of the Romantic Era, who was a child prodigy on the piano and began composing in his teens. As an adult, he moved to Paris, France, and became a well known composer of works for the piano, both solo and as a featured member of an ensemble.

The mandolin is the most famous member of the "mando" family that also includes the mandola and mandocello, among other instruments. The instruments in this family all have double courses of four strings, meaning that each string is paired with an exact twin, that is the same size and tuned to the same note. A mandolin is tuned just like a violin, while the mandola and mandocello are tuned like the viola and cello, respectively.