On May 30, 2008, at 2:44 PM, dhbailey wrote:
their use of any musical terms from Italian is much more idiomatic and not merely taken from a music dictionary, and so need to be considered more carefully than, for example, an American who only speaks English deciding to write Allegro at the start of a musical work.
The reason for the difference betw. musical Italian and real Italian is that the musical terms, once adopted as such, have changed their meaning without dragging the plain Italian words along with them. When allegro began to be used as a musical term, it meant the same thing as in plain Italian: "cheerful;" this gradually shifted to "cheerful, therefore lively" and finally to "conventionally rapid." We are all taught nowadays that "moderato" means "moderately," but it doesn't: it means "moderated"--i.e."held back," and till well into the 19th c. was considered a slower tempo than andante ("walking"). The reversal of these tempi came precisely because so many composers did not speak Italian and couldn't tell a past participle from an adverb.
Consider also al and alla, which are actually just masculine and feminine forms of "to the," but which in music have gradually lost their gender attachments and taken on different meanings: "until the" and "in the manner of" respectively.
Then there is "glissando" which is not even an Italian coinage: it comes from French "glisser," to slide, plus the Italian present participle ending "-ando." The Italian for "to slide" is scivolare. The ultimate irony is that "glissando" is now fully adopted into regular Italian as meaning "glissando."
I wonder why violins and violas have different genders in Italian?
In Italian, nouns ending in O are masculine while those ending in A are feminine (there are a few exceptions, notably "la mano").
In all the romance languages--including Latin--it has been a source of amusement for millennia that the everyday words for the male and female genitalia are feminine and masculine respectively. Casanova came up with his own tongue-in-cheek explanation: "because the slave takes the name of the master."
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://www.kallistimusic.com/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
