Italian for Musicians & Music Lovers
A Music Glossary

Music is often said to be a universal language,
but Italian just might be the language of music itself.
(James Bennett, WQXR)

Piano, forte, adagio, vivace, alla marcia, sforzando, ritardando… If you play an instrument, you have certainly come across these Italian words, and many more, while reading music. You use Italian words, or words of Italian origin, when you talk about music, such as concerto, opera, soprano, pianoforte: many of these terms are now part of an international music language.

For our series Italian for Musicians we browsed countless scores in search of those crucial little markings that shape our interpretation and understanding of the music as musicians or music lovers, and we presented their Italian pronunciation, their literal meaning, and their actual meaning(s) in music. We also provided short music excerpts to exemplify some of these terms.

We selected over 100 Italian words that deserved to be part of this collection, and grouped them in three categories: first of all Tempo Markings, often the very first Italian word that we find at the beginning of a piece, the one that tells us how fast or how slow it should be played and that sometimes also adds something about its character: a piece marked vivace is fast, for sure, but it’s also brilliant and lively, as the literal meaning of the word entails.

We then went on to explore Dynamics, i.e. softness and loudness, another fundamental feature of music. A piece can, for instance, start out pianissimo and then move on to mezzoforte through a crescendo, it can have unexpected accents, and then die away towards the end.

Our third and last video explores the realm of Expression & Articulation, arguably the most nuanced and sophisticated. Here we explain and exemplify the words that composers write in to make music passionate and expressive, or maybe nostalgic and mysterious, or tender and graceful.