On May 30, 2008, at 7:12 AM, Phil Daley wrote:
At 5/29/2008 05:07 PM, Christopher Smith wrote: >On May 29, 2008, at 4:56 PM, dc wrote: > >> Is there an English equivalent for "mezzo voce"? >> > >"Half-voice" is what I always used. Maybe without the hyphen (I tend >to put them in too often!) I was taught that "sotto voce" was half-voice? I thought "mezzo" was medium, like "mezzo soprano."
It does mean "medium" but in this context it would be sung more loudly than "sotto voce" ("Sotto" means "soft", so it help to remember that it is less volume than "mezza"; less than half-voice anyway). It's one of those terms that singers learned and using the term means that they all jump right away to the proper mindset. I don't know why we say "sotto" rather than "sotta" but we DO use "mezza" rather than the masculine "mezzo". No doubt a native Italian would understand why.
This is what I like about Italian musical terms; they mean something in music that is very specific and often not at all what the literal Italian means. LIke "Allegro" meaning "happy" more or less in Italian, but in music it means a fairly specific range of tempos.
There's another; "tempo". If we were to talk about "time" in music, nobody would follow us, but "tempo" means the speed of the ground pulse. Very little to do with the literal Italian meaning. This type of thing gives us our specific musical jargon that we need to describe the nuts and bolts of what we do. I approve heartily.
Christopher _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
