Duh-vore-jack

It might come as a small amusement to the Classical Music sector of Blogistan that the deciding word in the Annual National Scrips Spelling Bee this year was a classical music term: "appoggiatura".

For those wondering what an appoggiatura is, it's when the music reaches a single note and holds it for an indefinite period of time.

Oh, wait, that's not an appoggiatura, that's a fermata. OK, an appoggiatura is when the tones of a triad are sounded in sequential fashion, instead of at the same time. Cool!

Ach, dammit, that's an arpeggio, not an appoggiatura. It turns out that "appoggiatura" is a term used in a musical score to instruct the musician to perform a passage with intense emotion or feeling. There we go!










No, that's not right either. Actually, an appogiatura is what is commonly called a "grace note", usually one step above or one step below, the note that follows. Grace notes don't really exist within the meter of a piece, being generally intended more for ornamentation purposes.

(And yes, that's the correct definition. Yeesh. Stop looking at me like that!)

(Oh, and by the way, a really good musical dictionary online can be found here. Classical music is full of terminology derived from languages other than English, Percy Grainger's scores notwithstanding.)

UPDATE: In comments, Scott Spiegelberg tells me that even when I stop kidding above, I'm still full of bird poop:

An appoggiatura is a dissonant pitch that falls on the beat and resolves by step. It is usually approached by a leap. It can be notated as a grace note, but the kind that comes on the beat, not before it.

Well that settles that, then. But my definition was, if incomplete, better than the one offered in the news coverage of the spelling bee, when they simply identifed an "appoggiatura" as a "melodic tone". By that definition, every note in any musical work is an appoggiatura!