Ornament (music)
In music, ornaments or embellishments are musical flourishes—typically, added notes—that are not essential to carry the overall line of the melody (or harmony), but serve instead to decorate or "ornament" that line (or harmony), provide added interest and variety, and give the performer the opportunity to add expressiveness to a song or piece.
Similarly, a harpsichord player performing a simple melodic line was expected to be able to improvise harmonically and stylistically appropriate trills, mordents (upper or lower) and appoggiaturas.
In Spain, melodies ornamented upon repetition ("divisions") were called "diferencias", and can be traced back to 1538, when Luis de Narváez published the first collection of such music for the vihuela.
However, "[Heinrich Christoph] Koch expressed no preference and observed that it was scarcely a matter of much importance whether the trill began one way or the other, since there was no audible difference after the initial note had been sounded.
There is also a single tone trill variously called trillo or tremolo in late Renaissance and early Baroque.
[citation needed] The exact interpretation of this will vary according to the tempo of the piece, but the following is possible: Whether the note should be played before or on the beat is largely a question of taste and performance practice.
For example, Mozart's and Haydn's long appoggiaturas are – to the eye – indistinguishable from Mussorgsky's and Prokofiev's before-the-beat acciaccaturas.
All of the intervening diatonic or chromatic notes (depending on instrument and context) are heard, albeit very briefly.
In contemporary classical music (especially in avant garde pieces), a glissando tends to assume the whole value of the initial note.
"[12] From Silvestro Ganassi's treatise in 1535 we have instructions and examples of how musicians of the Renaissance and early Baroque periods decorated their music with improvised ornaments.
[This quote needs a citation] Until the last decade of the 16th century the emphasis is on divisions, also known as diminutions, passaggi (in Italian), gorgia ("throat", first used as a term for vocal ornamentation by Nicola Vicentino in 1555), or glosas (by Ortiz, in both Spanish and Italian) – a way to decorate a simple cadence or interval with extra shorter notes.
Towards the end of this period the divisions detailed in the treatises contain more dotted and other uneven rhythms and leaps of more than one step at a time.
Starting with Antonio Archilei [it] (1589),[full citation needed] the treatises bring in a new set of expressive devices called graces alongside the divisions.
It starts with the trillo and cascate, and by the time we reach Francesco Rognoni (1620) we are also told about fashionable ornaments: portar la voce, accento, tremolo, gruppo, esclamatione and intonatio.
One realisation of some common Baroque ornaments is set in the following table from the Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach by J.S.
"[15] Clive Brown explains that "For many connoisseurs of that period the individuality of a performer's embellishment of the divine notation was a vital part of the musical experience.
Even in Mozart's compositions, ornaments not included in the score are not allowed, as Brown explains: "Most of the chamber music from Mozart onwards that still remains in the repertoire belongs to the kind in which every note is thought out and which tolerates virtually no ornamental additions of the type under consideration here..."[16] Recent scholarship has however brought this statement in question.
[17] Jazz music incorporates a wide variety of ornaments including many of the classical ones mentioned above as well as a number of their own.
For instance, the fourth note (Ma) in Shankarabharanam or Begada allows at least three to five types of oscillation based on the phrasings within the raga.
A singer, fiddler, flautist, harpist, tin whistler, piper or a player of another instrument may add grace notes (known as 'cuts' / 'strikes' in Irish fiddling), slides, rolls, cranns, doubling, mordents, drones, trebles (or birls in Scottish fiddling), or a variety of other ornaments to a given melody.
