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Gulliver’s Travels vocabulary

327 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.

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descant: tags: [music]

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Definition:

can refer to several different things in music, depending on the period in question; etymologically, the word means a voice (cantus) above or removed from others.

A descant is a form of medieval music in which one singer sang a fixed melody, and others accompanied with improvisations. The word in this sense comes from the term discantus supra librum (descant "above the book"), and is a form of Gregorian chant in which only the melody is notated but an improvised polyphony is understood. The discantus supra librum had specific rules governing the improvisation of the additional voices.

Later on, the term came to mean the treble or soprano singer in any group of voices, or the higher pitched line in a song. Eventually, by the Renaissance, descant referred generally to counterpoint. Nowadays the counterpoint meaning is the most common.

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Uses:

also written discant, discantus

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if thou hadst learned the first part of hawking, thou wouldst have learned to have held fast, or the first note of descant, thou wouldst have kept thy sol-fa to thyself.

John Lyly. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578)

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my presence often gave them sufficient matter for discourse, because it afforded my master an occasion of letting his friends into the history of me and my country, upon which they were all pleased to descant, in a manner not very advantageous to humankind:

Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (1726)