Glossary

In music, stretto essentially means the overlapping of the same melodic idea/subject in two or more voices. Stretto can thus be considered a canonic technique, although it is usually applied only to a particular passage or passages within a piece that is not itself a canon. Stretto occurs typically in fugues. Paul Walker gives the […]

The term disposizione is used in the partimento tradition to refer to a fully written-out realization on as many staves as there are parts (in score) and in the Neapolitan counterpoint tradition to refer to a counterpoint exercise to be worked out in score. See also intavolatura. See also partimento. Select Bibliography Fenaroli, Fedele. METODO PER

The term intavolatura is used in the partimento tradition to refer to a fully written-out keyboard realization (on two staves). An important collection of intavolature is the so-called Parma Manuscript. It contains 24 keyboard realizations from the third book of partimenti by Fedele Fenaroli (1730–1818). See also disposizione. See also partimento. Select Bibliography Fenaroli, Fedele. METODO

In his book The Art of Partimento, Giorgio Sanguinetti gives the following general definition: “a partimento is a sketch, written on a single staff, whose main purpose is to be a guide for improvisation of a composition at the keyboard”(Sanguinetti (2012), p. 14). It can be provided with or without thoroughbass figures. See also partimento

A partimento diminuito is a partimento for which the composer provided one or more models/suggestions of how it can be realized. Those models were incipits —and thus quite short— and not necessarily referring to the first bar(s). The term first appears in the pedagogical oeuvre of the Neapolitan maestro Francesco Durante (1684–1755). In turn, one

Although metre is often considered a synonym for time signature, e.g. 4/4 or 6/8, its real meaning is more subtle. Metre could be defined as the hierarchical organization of bars, of beats and of subdivisions of beats in such a way that, with respect to time, a regular pattern appears that can be recognized as

A voice overlap occurs when two parts proceed to their next note and when that note of the lower part is higher than the previous note of the higher part, or —as is the case on the downbeat of bars 2 and 3 in the example below— when that note of the higher part is

An anticipation is a non-chord note on a weak beat or part of a beat that anticipates the first note of the next chord. This type of embellishment occurs frequently in cadences. Select Bibliography Kennan, Kent. Counterpoint Based on Eighteenth-Century Practice — Fourth Edition (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1999). Schubert, Peter & Christoph Neidhöfer. Baroque Counterpoint (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice

An escape note, or échappée, is a specific type of incomplete neighbour note and more specifically a non-chord note on a weak part of a beat that is What Is a Consonant Escape Note (Échappée)? A consonant escape note interrupts the usual descending motion of a dissonance (usually a seventh) to its resolution by first

A neighbour note is a non-chord note on a weak beat or part of a beat between two occurrences of the same note of the same chord or of two different chords. It can be located either a step above or a step below the chord factors: What Is an Incomplete Neighbour Note? An incomplete