Len's Music Blog

More Italian  Words  and some  M ore Shapes (entry for 7/26/2024) In the last post we talked about Italian and pseudo-Italian tempo and volume markings. Unfortunately, the matter which we covered, because of the limited space, was a bit abbreviated. This post will go into a bit more depth on those items, plus we’ll cover some musical ‘shapes’ that we haven’t discussed yet. First, some additional aspects of tempo markings. In addition to the basic markings like  Adagio  and  Presto , there are often ‘modifiers’ that are appended to those basic markings. There are also some other words that are used that change what has gone before without giving new absolute tempos. One of the most interesting of these modifiers is the phrase  ma non troppo , which means “but not too much.” For example,  Allegro ma non troppo  means “Fast, but not too much,” whereas  Adagio ma non troppo  means, “Slowly, but not too much.” The same modifier can also ...

Why Italian? (entry for 7/19/2024) One thing you’ve probably noticed by now is that a lot of the words associated with music are in Italian. Also, as you found out in the last two posts (if you didn’t already know), two important figures in the history of music notation, Guido d’Arezzo and Ugolindo da Fonti, were both Italian. The words ‘forte’ and ‘piano,’ meaning loud and soft, are both Italian.  (A pianoforte or fortepiano is a keyboard string instrument capable of playing either loudly or softy, which the previous clavichords and harpsichords were not. We call the pianoforte a 'piano,' for short. But a good one can certainly make a loud noise, in spite of its nickname!)  All the volume markings in use today are based on Italian words. Tempo indications, like Allegro, Andante, Largo, Vivace, and Presto, are all Italian. Any list of the first twenty or so famous classical composers of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries will be at least half Italians: Palestrina, Mon...

               Beyond Notes (Some other musical Shapes) (entry for 7/12/2024) As mentioned in the last post, about Note Shapes, the above picture is not of any kind of note. It's a 'Final Barline.' It's time now to go over some of the shapes used in music other than notes themselves, and get rid of some mis-impressions and misinformation that exist on the subject. The first thing to do is to clear up some confusion over the words 'bar' and 'barline.'  In the USA the two words are sometimes uses interchangeably, as though they both meant the same thing.  They don't.   To make matters clearer, let's go for a moment to the usage in the rest of the English-speaking world. In England, etc., the word 'bar' means the same thing that those of us in the USA mean when we say 'measure.' So I guess we'd better explain what we mean when we say 'measure'! The simplest way to describe a measure is to say that it the horizontal space ...