The vast majority of musical terms and directions used in English are of Italian origin, as many of the principal composers of the baroque and Renaissance periods who established much of what now forms the basis of classical music were Italian, including Palestrina, Monteverdi, Pergolesi and Vivaldi. Italian loanwords dominate lists of musical compositions and performances (concerto, opera, sonata), musical instruments (piano, tuba, viola, piccolo) and voices (soprano, contralto, alto), as well as performance instructions describing variables like speed (tempo, allegro, presto) and volume (forte, crescendo, diminuendo). Italian terms are also used to give character to a piece of music, explaining how it should feel or sound – pieces marked agitato, animato and maestoso, for instance, should sound ‘agitated’, ‘animated’ and ‘majestic’, respectively. Others dictate how an instrument should be played, like pizzicato, telling a player to pluck the strings, and con legno, indicating that a string should be played with the wooden part of a bow.
An abbreviation of the Latin phrase ad libitum, meaning ‘at one’s pleasure’ (a form of the same verb, libire, from which libido is also derived), the word ad-lib has a variety of senses in English, amongst the earliest of which is its use as a musical term indicating that a corresponding passage of music is optional and need not necessarily be performed. Dating from the mid-1700s, in this context the word ad-lib was often applied to a musical part written for an instrument that could be excluded from an ensemble if need be. In more modern compositions the term tends to be used to indicate that a piece can be played in whatever way the performer sees fit, or else that some part of it can be improvised or embellished at the performer’s discretion. The more general use of ad-lib to refer to a spontaneous or unplanned remark dates from the early nineteenth century, whilst the use of ad-lib as a verb was first recorded in 1910.
As the name of a type of portable rocket launcher, the word bazooka was first used in English in 1943. Before this, the bazooka was originally a musical instrument, a large, rudimentary wind instrument similar to a trombone, which was invented in the early 1900s by Bob Burns, an American comedian and radio star who went on to become one of the most popular US entertainers of the Second World War. Burns constructed his original bazooka (a derivative of bazoo, a slang name for the mouth) from two lengths of gas pipe and a funnel. When the US military’s portable M1 anti-tank rocket-launcher was introduced in 1942 American troops soon nicknamed it the bazooka due to its apparent similarity to Burns’s invention.
Dating from the mid-nineteenth century, the musical term downbeat is used to describe the strongest or most heavily accented beat of a bar of music, so called as it would be the beat on which a conductor would bring the baton downwards, before a subsequent upbeat. Quite how the term gained a later adjectival sense meaning ‘gloomy’, ‘unpretentious’ or ‘subdued’, however, is unclear but it is perhaps simply due to the somewhat negative connotations of the word down.
Borrowed into English from Italian in the mid-1700s, the word finale was originally a musical term, used to denote the concluding movement of an opera, symphony or similarly lengthy composition, before gaining an extended figurative use in the nineteenth century for any grand ending or conclusion. The word is descended from the Latin word finalis, meaning ‘final’, and ultimately finis, meaning ‘end’ or ‘limit’, and as such is related to other English words including infinity, define and affinity.
The word gamut dates from the early sixteenth century in English and is formed from a contraction of the Latin gamma-ut, the name given to the lowest note on the medieval musical scale which now corresponds to the second G below middle C. Historically, the Greek letter gamma was used to represent this bass G, while ut was used as the first syllable of the solfège or sol-fa, the scaled series of musical syllables that now usually begins do, re, mi. Over time, the use of the word gamut broadened to refer not just to the lowest note on the scale but to the entire range of the scale itself, and by the seventeenth century it had begun to be used figuratively to refer to the full scope or range of anything, the meaning by which it is almost exclusively used today.
As an adjective referring to the action of water or other fluids moving through pipes, the word hydraulic dates from the 1660s. It is derived via the Latin hydraulicus, a word used by the Romans for various water-propelled engines, from the Greek words hydor, meaning ‘water’, and aulos, meaning ‘pipe’ or ‘flute’. The word is ultimately related to the Ancient Greek hydraulis, a type of water organ said to have been invented by the Greek engineer Ctesibius in the third-century BC, which used a mixture of air and water pressure to produce its sound. The hydraulis is considered by some to have been the first keyboard instrument in the history of music.
The word melodrama was adopted into English from Italian in the late eighteenth century as a musical term referring to a spoken dramatic performance accompanied by songs or music, or else a section of a much larger musical composition, like an opera, during which instrumental music is played to accompany a spoken passage or speech. Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (1805) features perhaps the most well-known melodrama in all classical music, although other famous examples include a similar passage in Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (1945), and Richard Strauss’s musical adaptation of the Tennyson poem ‘Enoch Arden’ (1897). The more general use of melodrama to refer to a sensational or overly dramatic scene dates from the early nineteenth century.
In music, the keynote is the first and lowest note of a musical scale (also known as the tonic), which establishes the tonality or key of the notes that follow it. The word dates from the late 1600s in English, but since the mid-1700s has been used in a broader metaphorical sense to refer to the tone or principle behind an argument or discussion. In this context, keynote is most often found today as part of the expression keynote speech or keynote address, a phrase originating in American English in the early twentieth century, which typically refers to the opening speech of a conference which outlines the focus of the meeting as a whole.
Used generally to denote a smooth transition or movement from one situation to another, the word segue was originally purely a musical term of equivalent meaning, instructing a performer to move seamlessly from one section or piece of music to the next. Like most musical directions, the word was adopted into English from Italian, and literally means ‘follows’. It was first recorded in English in the mid-1700s, but in a general sense of ‘seamless movement’ dates from the 1950s.
What we consider a telephone dates back in the English language to the 1870s and the development of numerous electrical communication devices by inventors including Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray. The word telephone itself, however – a compound of the Greek telos, meaning ‘far’, and phone, meaning ‘sound’ – is considerably older. In fact, it dates back as far as the 1830s to a device created by the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century French musician and inventor Jean-François Sudré that used musical notes as a means of relaying messages across distances. Sudré, who had earlier devised an artificial language named Solresol that used combinations of musical notes to spell out words, first demonstrated his musical téléphone in the 1820s, with the first written record of his ‘telephone system’ dating from 1835, predating Bell’s invention by some forty years.