organum
Americannoun
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organa,
plural
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organums
plural
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an organon.
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Music.
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the doubling, or simultaneous singing, of a melody at an interval of either a fourth, a fifth, or an octave.
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the second part in such singing.
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noun
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a form of polyphonic music originating in the ninth century, consisting of a plainsong melody with parts added at the fourth and fifth
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a variant of organon
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of organum
From Latin, dating back to 1605–15; see origin at organ
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Brasser's son, Jim, added bass harmonies to the family tunes and so the distinctive Copper Family style began to emerge – carefully arranged and pitched with a tuning fork, reminiscent of a medieval organum.
From The Guardian ● Aug. 5, 2011
And in an epilogue, he imagines where man stands in the novum organum: a puzzled inflection of star stuff, a mote of mind that glitters for a moment on the grand galactic stream.
From Time Magazine Archive
They had of course inherited the technology from Ktesibios's hydraulis organ - and the name organum likewise comes from the Greek organon, meaning instrument or tool.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
As time went on, more adventurous musicians, such as the ninth-century Byzantine composer Kassia of Constantinople, began mixing the parallel organum style with the drone style.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
If we imagine parallel organum as a train track winding across the landscape, the drone style looked more like a graph in which one line moves and the other stays constant.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
Winchester’s Troper of two-voice organa manuscripts and its mighty four- hundred-voice pipe organ were the work of Anglo-Saxon Christians.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
A commentator on Aristotle, writing in the 4th century A.D., calls certain instruments used for fusion and calcination "chuika organa," that is, instruments for melting and pouring.
From The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry by M. M. Pattison Muir
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
