In order to indicate the intended musical context of a composition with a universally recognisable vocabulary, composers all around the world (and from the ages past!) enjoy the use of certain expressions in one of the 3 main European languages: Italian, German, and French. Let’s start here with the most used terms in Italian, which makes up probably about 90% of all musical composer-musician dialogue! Enjoy discovering, and try them out at the tip of your tongue, too! It’s fun!

Accelerando - Accelerating

Adagio - Slow / at an easy pace

Affettuoso - Affectionately

Agitato - Agitatedly

Al / Alla - In the style of

Allargando - Broadening (Literally, large-ning)

Allegro / Allegretto - Happy (fast) / Moderately happy (moderately fast)

Andante / Andantino - At a walking pace / Somewhat at a walking pace (this can mean either slightly faster or slightly slower. The final decision of an exact speed needs to be decided by the context.)

Animato - Animatedly

Appassionato - Passionately

Arco - Change to playing with bow (after pizzicato/plucked section)

Arioso - Like an aria (very fluid, as if singing a love song)

Assai - Very

Attacca - ‘Attack’: Go the next section, without stopping (instead of leaving a pause before beginning). Composers sometimes use this to keep the transition between movements as seamless as possible.

Ben (+adjective) - Very (+adjective)

Brio - Vigour / vibrancy. Usually: Con (with) brio.

Cantabile / Cantando - Singing

Capriccioso - Funny, mischievous

Con / Col / Colla (+ verb/noun) - With the (+ verb/noun).

For example: Col legno (with the wood of the bow), con calma (calmly).

Comodo / Comodamente - Comfortably

Con (+ adjectvive / noun) - With (+ Adjective/noun). For example: con brio.

Crescendo - Gaining in volume (dynamics). Also written as cresc. in short form.

Da capo - From the top (literally, ‘from the head’). This appears after a section of repetition and the composer wants us to start again from the material at the top of the page.

Dal Segno- From the Sign (this can take many forms, but is usually represented by a highly stylised S-Shape).

Deciso - Decisively

Decrescendo / Diminuendo - Opposite of Crescendo. Waning in volume (dynamics). Literally, ‘diminishing’.

Delicato - Delicately

Dolce - Sweetly

Doloroso - Painfully

Energico - Energetically

Espressivo - Expressively

Facile - Easily

Fine - The end

Forte / Fortissimo - Strong dynamics (loud) / Very strong (very loud).

Forza - Force. For example, con forza (forcefully).

Fretta - Rushing

Fuoco - Fire. For example, con fuoco (With fire).

Furioso - Furiously

Giocoso - Playfully

Gioioso - Joyfully/ joyously

Grandioso - Grandly

Grave - Gravely. Darkly.

Grazioso - Gracefully

Impetuoso - Impetuously. Impatiently.

Lacrimoso - Tearfuly. Mournfully.

Largo / Larghetto - Broadly/ Somewhat broadly.

Legato- Smoothly. No audible break between notes.

Leggero / Leggiero - Lightly

Lento - Slowly

Liberamente - Freely

Maestoso - Majestically

Marcato - Marked (articulation on every note).

Meno (+Adjective/dynamic) - Less. For example, Meno mosso (less movement), meno forte (less loud).

Mezzoforte (MF) / Mezzopiano (MP) - Moderately loud (less than forte) / Moderately soft (more than piano)

Misterioso - Mysteriously

Moderato - Moderately paced

Molto - Very. Quite.

Morendo - Waning. Dying.

Mosso - Active, moving. Pushing. For example: più mosso (more active), meno mosso (less active).

Moto - Movement. (Con moto means with movement)

Nobile - Noble/nobly.

Non - Not. For example, allegro ma non troppo (quick but not too much).

Ostinato - Obstinately. To be played with very regular tempo and rhythm.

Parlando - As if talking (about an event, or to someone).

Pausa - Pause

Perdendosi - Losing oneself

Pesante - Heavily

Piangendo - Crying

Piano / Pianissimo - Gently, softly (also written as p) / Very gently, very softly (pp)

Piu’ - More

Pizzicato (Pizz.) - Played by plucking the string (instead of bowing)

Poco / Pochissimo - Little / Very Little.

Precipitando - Falling, stumbling, running into a higher pace. The effect is acceleration and loss of control.

Presto - At a quick pace

Prima / Primo - The first. For example, tempo primo (first indicated tempo).

Quasi - Almost. For example, quasi niente (almost nothing).

Rallentando - Slowing down

Rigoroso - Rigorously. Energetically.

Rinforzando - Reinforcing (gaining) in energy and speed

Risoluto - Resolute (very steady speed)

Ritardando - Slowing down

Ritenuto - Holding back

Ritmico - Rhythmically

Rubato - Taking time. Literally, ‘stealing’ time.

Scherzo / Scherzando - A joke / jokingly

Seconda / Secondo - The second. For example violino secondo (second violin/s).

Semplice - Simply

Sempre - Always

Senza - Without. For example, senza vibrato (without vibrato).

Segue - As before. Literally, ‘to follow’.

Sforzando - Usually written as sfz. Accented / strongly reinforced articulation.

Simile - Similar. (Like segue, but less commonly used.)

Slancio - Onward precipitation by force of inertia. Like accelerando, but less common.

Smorzando - Dampening/ refraining in general energy (speed, sound).

Sonoro - Resonant, with rich tone.

Sopra - Above

Sospirando - Sighingly (to imitate a singer’s voice - from a death scene, for example).

Sostenuto - Sustained sound and articulation

Spirito - Spirit, life, energy. Usually, con spirito.

Spiritoso - Mischievously

Staccato - Clearly detached notes. Opposite of legato.

Stringendo - Clearly detached notes. Opposite of legato.

Subito - Suddenly. For example, subito forte (sub. f), subito piano (sub. p).

Tacet - (Latin) Silence. For example, when a soloist is playing and the orchestra stays silent.

Tempo - Speed

Tenero - Tenderly

Tenuto - Same as Ritenuto - held. May be an instruction for either articulation or speed, or both.

Tranquillo - Tranquil. Calm.

Triste - Sad

Troppo - Too much. Usually seen in the combination: , ma non troppo (_, but not too much).

Tutti - Everyone (this follows a solo section where the accompaniment / orchestra stays silent - Tacet).

Veloce - Quick

Vigoroso - Vigorous

Vivace / Vivo - Vivacious / Lively. (Also, very fast.)

Voce - Voice

With various students I’ve tried different methods over the years to make the reading of the dots and lines on the page as accessible as possible. The verdict? All it takes is some good old mathematical logic, and a little intellectual ‘elbow grease’ to get into the grind of things, and surely enough, things start to make sense the moment we start stringing up all this information together, in the form of a simple piece! let’s start with some self-discovery to help illustrate what we’re really dealing with :)

STEP 1:

A little self-awareness experiment.

Take a look at your hands. Give every single finger a wiggle, up-down and left-right, trying your best to move that single finger and nothing else. What do you notice? Which two neighbouring fingers seem to always be affecting the other?

Maybe you’ve got it right, so here’s the answer! The middle and ring fingers, being the two center fingers, have a shared nerve which makes them naturally bound to the other’s movements. This poses a unique challenge to all instrument-playing musicians, but not to worry! We have plenty of ways to develop finger independence in our learning process! Also, if you happen to have all the other fingers wiggle in unison with whichever single finger you were trying to control individually, fret not! Me too, if I’m being honest :)))

💪💪💪

So, the whole point of this little experiment was to illustrate why we place our fingers the way we do on the violin, and at VSG, this is what we call the ‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ first position. It looks a little something like this:

notice the natural spaces between each of the fingers?

Whilst the middle two fingers touch, the first two fingers and the last two fingers don’t! This gives us the natural configuration of the first-position hand: denoted by numbers per finger, starting with 1 for the index finger: 1__23__4 😜

And voilà, we’ve just discovered the most important basis for finding our notes on the violin! CONGRATS FOR MAKING IT UNTIL HERE!!!

Step 2:

Understand that every finger-space represents the ‘home’ of a note.

just imagine…

each note living in its very own home, and a whole long staircase to join them all up. And, much like real houses, not all notes occupy the same amount of space - something that we measure in ‘steps’. Lucky for us, the combinations all start from half- or whole-steps. As soon as we learn to recognise this, learning to read and to understand the relationships between notes becomes easy… all we need to do is to count the number of half- or whole- steps!

Step 3:

Understand how all of this fits into musical notation

Broadly speaking, the notes that we play are easily recognised in the form of the piano keyboard. You might be thinking, ‘but I’m here for the violin! What does that have to do with the piano?’, and to that, I’ll say, give it a minute! The convenience that the presentation of the piano keyboard offers us is the simple spelling-out of all the half- and whole-steps we’d ever need to understand the way music is written on paper, and it helps that everything is laid out, well, in black and white! Let us consider the piano keyboard at the bottom of this following diagram:

Let’s first ignore all the indications coloured in red for now. Looking at the arrangement of the black and white keys of the piano keyboard, we quickly observe the emergence of a recurring pattern - 2 black keys to each other (I like to think of them as two little front teeth), followed by 3 black keys, and so on! Where we have no black keys separating the white keys on the keyboard, the distance between these two next-door white-key neighbours is considered a half-step. On the violin, we create this next-door relationship by having two fingertips line up next to each other, touching, on the fingerboard. Easy enough, so far!

Now, what’s important to note is that any single sideways movement on the piano keyboard, stepwise, is similarly counted as a half-step. This includes a white key going to a black key, and vice versa. But the music that we play isn’t only composed of single sideways steps! In order to quickly and efficiently create the other sort of standard measurement that we briefly mentioned before, all we need is to separate the two interested fingers at their base (in the palm) and create just enough breathing space to introduce a small window between the two fingertips, thereby creating a full step! Now, this all sounds very simple, in theory, but as our current VSG-ers can attest, being able to successfully and reliably pull up a full step between two fingers takes a lot of method, and practice! But that’s of course what I’m here for, to make your life easier by accompanying your violin-playing adventure with constant guidance and heartfelt encouragement! But, you get the point :)

Now, there’s obviously a lot more that goes into actually being able to read the music in front of you, and to understand what you’re seeing. But for now, I think this is more than enough information to start, but if you want to know more, why not get in touch with me, Cheryl, and see how I can help you along your very own violin-learning journey, in as logical and enjoyable a way as possible, all while living the beautifully diverse life you already have?

Write in to violinstudiogeneva@gmail.com and be sure to add our address to your contacts page, in order to be sure you get our response (and not have it lost in spam, for example… sounds funny enough, but it’s happened before).

But above all, ENJOY your time here with us, and HAPPY PRACTISING!!!

X.O.