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I would like a nice reference to look up all those terms we see in musical notation. (Frequently in italian)

What should I get?

Hi Kenny -

I asked a similar question on a different message board once upon a time. I received two answers. Here is the link:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0065de


Hope this helps. No, I didn't get any dictionary yet. Still waiting for money to accumulate.



[ December 07, 2001: Message edited by: ChemicalGrl ]

The Oxford Companion To Music (I think) is one that can be helpful in defining things, too. My mother and my wife both ironically have a copy, so I don't know how to get it .

Chris W

I suppose you can print the following:

web page

Eric

Just buy the Harvard "Brief Dictionairy of Music." It's pocket-sized and will run at most $7, which is chump change in the long run considering how much use you get out of it.

Schirmer's "Pocket Manual of Musical Terms" will give most all the esoteric terms (especially German ones) that crop up in scores. These are not always in the general, single-volume music encyclopedias. And it gives pronunciations.

I'm not familiar with Harvard "Brief." There are now two hardcover Harvards: one is a general music encyclopedia (theory, history, musical terms, etc.) and the other gives biographical material on composers. The "Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music" isn't split in two like Harvard. http://www.friendshiphouse.com/8100ta.html

Hope that one of these helps!

http://musicnet.chandra.ac.th/eng/mus_dic.htm

http://library.thinkquest.org/2791/MDOPNSCR.htm?tqskip=1

I have the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music. It lists at $16.50. So far I have NEVER found any term on any score that was not in it.

Regards,
Dan

Okay, here's one. I had been trying to find a definition for this term for ever. That desire to find this definition was the one which spawned my question on Brent Hugh's message board in the first place (see my previous post above).

Here is the term, which came from Randall Thompson's "Alleluia" :

Movendo

The only thing I can come up with is "with movement," and in French, I believe the term is "Mouvemente." So I guess what I'm asking is the term Movendo in any of the music dictionaries? The last time I went to the local music store, I leafed through several of the dictionaries they had on-hand; didn't find that term there, nor did I find the term in any of the on-line dictionaries I stumbled upon.

Schrimer's pocket dictionary has 'Movendo il tempo' = growing faster and 'Mouvement' = tempo

Ok, so far I have only ever found ONE term that's not in my dictionary...

<sigh>

Dan