Stephen Johnson gets to grips with classical music’s technical terms <\/p>
An apoggiatura is a grace note, which is a type of musical ornament. It is a \u2018leaning\u2019 note, which takes half or more of the duration of the following note. They often take place on the beat, rather than just before.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2018Sexual intercourse began in 1963,\u2019 wrote Philip Larkin ruefully, \u2018Between the end of the Chatterley<\/i> ban, And the Beatles\u2019 first LP.\u2019 Beside those epochal events you might think that the rediscovery of the acciaccatura and the appoggiatura were pretty low down on the culture shock scale. <\/span><\/p>\n Not in my house. My father had learned his Handel Messiah<\/i> in the days when what was written on the page was the music. The very idea of doing anything extra with it: adding embellishments, or even just bending the rhythms\u2026 Great Heavens, it was tantamount to jazz!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> In fact, the early 1960s marked the beginning of a cultural revolution in classical music: the Period Performance Movement. Among other things, this brought the realisation that the way baroque composers expected their music to be performed was, in many ways, quite a lot like jazz. Take the matter of \u2018grace notes\u2019. <\/span><\/p>\n When a contemporary observed that Purcell sang his own music \u2018with many graces\u2019, he didn\u2019t mean that he sang it with supreme elegance, rather that he was lavish with ornamentation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Then dawned another, still more terrible realisation: this might even apply to Mozart! The way people performed Mozart\u2019s recitatives began to change. Endings of phrases that used simply to drop down onto the home note, solidly on the beat, now came with a lingered-out \u2018dying fall\u2019, a sighing downward step.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> This was the appoggiatura \u2013 literally a \u2018leaning\u2019 note. Musically one didn\u2019t just throw oneself down, one lowered oneself slowly, relishing the sense of taking the weight off one\u2019s feet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One also had to learn to distinguish between different kinds of written grace notes (the ones in tiny print before the main note). Previous practice had been to snatch them out of the way as quickly as possible, or just ignore them. <\/span><\/p>\n Now we had to differentiate between those that were meant to be played as quickly as possible, ahead of the beat (acciaccature), and those that signified a languorous \u2018leaning\u2019 (appoggiature). A line through the stem of the note meant acciaccatura; without a line, appoggiatura.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> How to remember which is which? The \u2018cciacc\u2019 of \u2018acciaccatura\u2019 is pronounced like \u2018catch\u2019 \u2013 and the effect is like a catch in the voice; conversely the \u2018ppoggi\u2019 part of appoggiatura might suggest a \u2018podgy\u2019 human form lowering itself into an armchair. <\/span><\/p>\n Either way, today Handel \u2013 and Mozart \u2013 would sound bare without them.<\/span><\/p>\n This article was first published in the September 2011 issue of BBC Music Magazine<\/em><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n Stephen Johnson gets to grips with classical music’s technical terms <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":24993,"template":"","categories":[1,17],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"3"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/03\/what-is-an-apoggiatura.jpg",1004,768,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/03\/what-is-an-apoggiatura-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/03\/what-is-an-apoggiatura-300x229.jpg",300,229,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/03\/what-is-an-apoggiatura-768x587.jpg",768,587,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/03\/what-is-an-apoggiatura.jpg",800,612,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/03\/what-is-an-apoggiatura.jpg",1004,768,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/03\/what-is-an-apoggiatura.jpg",1004,768,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Stephen Johnson gets to grips with classical music's technical terms","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/24992"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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