Music Words

What you are actually practicing

Music notation has its own instruction words, and they fall into a few clear groups. Some describe speed, some describe loudness, some describe how notes are joined, and some describe the structure of the key itself.

Learning them as a set of categories rather than as a random vocabulary list makes them far easier to remember. Once you know that tempo words are Italian and describe speed, and that dynamic words describe loudness, you can place an unfamiliar term on sight.

How the game works

You are shown a music term and four possible meanings. Tap the correct one. A wrong pick shows the answer immediately.

Easy covers the words found in almost any beginner's lesson. Medium adds the ones you meet in a concert programme. Hard uses the full list, including the structural terms that describe a score rather than a performance.

The links worth knowing

Speed: tempo is the speed of the music as a whole. Allegro is fast and lively, andante is at a walking pace, adagio is slow, presto is very fast, and largo is broad and very slow.

Loudness: forte is loud, piano is soft, fortissimo is as loud as possible and pianissimo as soft as possible. Crescendo means gradually getting louder and diminuendo means gradually getting quieter.

Note length and articulation: staccato notes are played short and detached, legato notes are joined smoothly, tenuto notes are held for their full value, and an accent marks a note played with extra force.

Structure: a chord is three or more notes sounding together, a key signature is the set of sharps or flats that belongs to a piece, and a time signature gives the rhythm pattern. A rest is a written silence. An octave is the same note eight scale steps apart.

Clefs: the treble clef is the G clef, used for higher notes; the bass clef is the F clef, used for lower notes; the alto clef is the C clef, sitting in the middle.

How to get faster

Group the words before you memorise them. Sorting twenty terms into four categories takes a couple of minutes and then every term has a place to live, which is what makes recall fast under pressure.

A note on the tricky one

Crescendo and diminuendo describe a change across several notes rather than a single level, which is what makes them easy to confuse with plain loud and soft. If the music is getting louder, that is a crescendo; if it is loud and stays loud, that is forte.