As with any discipline, music requires its own vocabulary, which you will need to learn as you develop your compositional technique. You should use these terms in your journals, concert reviews, etc. (as appropriate) to demonstrate your familiarity with and understanding of this vocabulary. Students continuing as composition majors will be expected to know these terms for the Freshman Barrier Examination.
vernacular/non-vernacular music — precomposition
monophony — polyphony — homophony — tessitura — range — motive — sequence — contour — balance — conjunct motion (e.g., scalar) — disjunct motion (e.g., chordal) — climax — accent: dynamic, tonic, agogic, and metric — syncopation — cadence — phrase (antecedent and consequent) — period — word painting — syllabic vs. melismatic
major/minor scales — modes: ionian, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, & locrian — pentatonic scales: hemitonic & anhemitonic — whole-tone scale — octatonic scale — synthetic scales — Impressionism — Exoticism
form/process — canon — fugue — passacaglia/chaconne — sonata — rondo — arch form — tonal axes — Fibonacci series — golden proportion — isorhythm (talea and color) — modes of limited transposition — non-retrogradable rhythms — palindrome
frequency — amplitude — wave shape: sine, sawtooth, triangle, square — harmonic (overtone) series — envelope: attack, decay, sustain, release — temperament — just intonation — Pythagorean tuning — equal temperament — cent — microtonality — quarter-tones
extended tertian chord — quartal chord — quintal chord — secundal chord (tone cluster) — parallel harmony (planing) — “mystic chord” — Gebrauchsmusik
atonality (pantonality) — “emancipation of the dissonance” — Expressionism — Second Viennese School — Klangfarbenmelodie — Sprechstimme — pointillism
dodecaphony/twelve-tone composition — tone row/series — matrix —transformations (prime, retrograde, inversion, retrograde-inversion) — hexachord — tetrachord — trichord — combinatoriality — partition — invariance — integral (total) serialism — time-point system