Ornaments

An ornament is a note, or a group of notes, added to a note of the melody or the accompaniment to decorate it. The note that receives the decoration is the main note (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII).

An ornament does not lengthen the bar. The time it takes comes out of some main note, almost always the very note it decorates (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). A quarter note with an ornament still lasts a quarter note; it is just that more notes now sound inside it.

In the score, ornaments appear in two ways: as small notes before the main note, or as signs written above it (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII).

Where they come from, and why the books hesitate

Ornaments were born on old keyboard instruments such as the harpsichord, which cannot sustain a sound: the string is plucked and the sound dies quickly. Decorating a long note with neighbouring notes was a way to make it last (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). Until the early seventeenth century they were hardly written down and performers improvised them; the freedom went as far as making melodies unrecognisable, and composers began to mark them with signs (Med 1996, ch. XLIV).

Med sums up the three routes: an ornament can be improvised, with no indication at all; marked by a sign; or written out note by note (Med 1996, ch. XLIV). Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, above all harpsichord music, is full of signs; contemporary music uses few ornaments and prefers to write them out (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII).

The trouble is that each period, and sometimes each composer, performed the same sign differently. All three books say so plainly. Lacerda speaks of the "extreme confusion" about the classical ornaments and limits himself to the most common (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). Med says the theory of ornaments belongs more to performance practice than to music theory, and that the choices depend on taste and historical knowledge (Med 1996, ch. XLIV). Blatter leaves performance outside his book and asks the reader only to recognise the small notes as ornaments, played quickly, on the beat or just before it, depending on the composer, the period and the tradition (Blatter 2007, part 1, art. 3).

So what follows is the most common performance of each ornament. The examples write out what is played, because that is what is heard.

Appoggiatura

The appoggiatura is a note a tone or a semitone above or below the main note, which comes before it (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). The name comes from the Italian appoggiare, to lean (Med 1996, ch. XLIV): the melody leans on a neighbouring note before reaching the main note. It can be upper or lower, single (one note) or double (two), and there are two kinds that change everything in performance: the long and the short.

The long appoggiatura, or expressive appoggiatura, is written as a small note without a stroke and takes half the value of an undotted main note, or one or two thirds of a dotted one (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). The accent falls on it, not on the main note (Med 1996, ch. XLIV). A small D before a half-note C is played like this:

Hear the passage

It is a sigh: the outside note falls on the beat, with weight, and resolves into the main note.

The short appoggiatura is written as a small note crossed by an oblique stroke, and it is very short (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). Here the books part ways over where it takes its time from:

Book	Where the short appoggiatura sounds
Lacerda	before the beat: its value comes out of the note before the main note
Med	on the beat: it takes the smallest part of the main note, and the accent stays on the main note; the one that sounds before the beat he calls an acciaccatura

Lacerda describes the short appoggiatura that anticipates (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII), and Med keeps a separate name for that one (Med 1996, ch. XLIV). Both describe real practices. Blatter sums it up: on the beat or just before it, depending on the composer and the period (Blatter 2007, part 1, art. 3). Played on the beat, a short D appoggiatura on a quarter-note C comes out like this:

Hear the passage

Mordent

The mordent is a quick performance of the main note with the note a tone or a semitone above or below it, returning to the main note (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). It is upper when it uses the note above and lower when it uses the note below. The single mordent has three notes, counting the main note; the double repeats the motion and has five.

Lacerda writes the mordent with a short zigzag line over the note. Without a stroke it is the upper mordent; crossed by a vertical stroke it is the lower mordent (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). Med uses the same sign with the same distinction (Med 1996, ch. XLV). An upper mordent on a quarter-note C:

Hear the passage

If the neighbouring note carries an accidental, the accidental is written with the sign (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII).

Turn

The turn plays the main note with both its neighbours, the one above and the one below (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). Its Italian name, gruppetto, means a small group, and in some languages it is called a "wrapping": the main note is wrapped in its neighbours (Med 1996, ch. XLVI). The sign is a sideways S. In the normal form the turn starts from the note above; the inverted turn starts from the note below, and its sign is drawn the other way (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII).

Med separates two places for it (Med 1996, ch. XLVI):

• the attack turn, with the sign over the note, is played at its start: upper neighbour, main note, lower neighbour, main note;
• the medial turn, with the sign between two notes, is played at the end of the first: the main note sounds first, and the turn fills the last part of its value, leading to the next note.

An attack turn on a quarter-note C:

Hear the passage

Trill

The trill is the fast alternation of two neighbouring notes, one of them the main note (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). It is written tr, tr followed by a wavy line, or the wavy line alone. It lasts the whole value of the main note, and the score does not say how many notes it has: that depends on the note's value and the tempo, and the same trill has fewer notes in an Adagio than in an Allegro (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII).

The normal trill uses the note above. A trill on a quarter-note C, written out in thirty-second notes:

Hear the passage

This example starts on the main note, which is what Med calls a direct trill. He also records the trill that starts on the note above, and says the choice depends on style and composer (Med 1996, ch. XLVII). In Baroque music starting from the note above is the more common practice; in a trill by Mozart or Chopin, editions and performers disagree. A trill can also have a preparation, small notes before it, and a termination, a small figure at the end that leads into the next note (Med 1996, ch. XLVII).

Arpeggio

The arpeggio plays the notes of a chord one after another, quickly, instead of all together, usually from the lowest to the highest (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). It is marked with a vertical wavy line before the chord, or with arp. When the arpeggio goes down, that has to be marked. In short values each note stops sounding soon after it is played; in long values the notes are held until the next chord (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII).

Med observes that the arpeggio is more a way of playing than a true ornament: it adds no note, it only spreads the notes out in time (Med 1996, ch. XLVIII).

Glissando and portamento

The glissando is a fast, continuous slide from one note to another (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). How it sounds depends on the instrument:

• on a fixed-pitch instrument such as the piano or the harp, the hand slides over the keys or strings in between. On the piano the glissando can run over the white keys only, the black keys only, or both (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII);
• on an instrument without fixed pitches, such as the violin, the trombone or the voice, the sound passes through every pitch on the way, without steps. It is written with a line between the two notes and the abbreviation gliss. (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII).

Med adds the glissando through the harmonic series, which brass instruments play, and notes that the stepless glissando is possible on strings and voice and, in part, on the trombone and pedal timpani (Med 1996, ch. XLVIII).

Portamento has clashing definitions. For Lacerda it is a quick, discreet slide from one note to the next, made just before the second is attacked, proper to the voice and to instruments without fixed pitches; on instruments he calls it portando, and in the voice portamento, marked with a curve joining notes on different syllables (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). Med uses the word for something else: a short note that anticipates the main note at the same pitch (Med 1996, ch. XLVIII). Lacerda's sense is the one singers and string players use every day.

Flourish and cadenza

A flourish is a group of notes inserted between two main notes (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). It has no fixed shape, and its time comes out of the main note before it. The difference from a melodic cadenza is the bar: the flourish is short and has to fit inside the bar, while the cadenza is longer and free of it, because the main note before it carries a fermata (Med 1996, ch. XLVIII).

The grand cadenza of a concerto, the passage where the soloist plays alone and shows what they can do, is no longer an ornament: Med treats it as a musical form. It used to be improvised on the concerto's themes, until composers such as Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Liszt began to write it out (Med 1996, ch. XLVIII).

What holds for all of them

The speed of any ornament depends on the value of the note and on the tempo: the same arpeggio is slower in an Adagio than in an Allegro (Lacerda 1966, ch. XXXVIII). And an ornament has to sound clearly, at the same dynamic as the main notes, not as a blur before them (Med 1996, ch. XLIV).

The notes of an ornament are outside notes that decorate a main note. Harmony has close relatives of them: the appoggiatura and the neighbour note also appear as non-chord tones, and there the question is no longer how to decorate a note but how an outside note resolves into the chord.