Multilingual Music Glossary

# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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Found a word you don't know? No problem. Look it up in the Music Glossary!

We are currently providing explanations for 2484 terms from 12 languages, including English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Latin…

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Please note: a music glossary is just like a dictionary. It contains explanations to musical terms. If you are looking for a piece, please go here instead: search tunes.

Some random terms

  • florid Rich, embellished.
  • mambo [Spanish] Dance of Afro-Cuban origin with a characteristic quadruple-meter rhythmic pattern.
  • volando [Italian] Flying.
  • beat The basic time unit of a piece of music. For example, each tick sounded by a metronome would correspond to a beat.
  • spigliato [Italian] Self-confident, bold, smooth.
  • tremolo [Italian] A rapid alternation between two notes.
  • tie A curved line drawn over or under the heads of two notes of the same pitch indicating that they should be played as a single note.
  • camminando [Italian] Literally, “walking”. With easy and gentle progression.
  • vocalization The singing of vocalises.
  • rock A loosely defined genre of popular music that entered the mainstream in the mid 1950s, characterized by a hard, driving duple meter and amplified instrumental accompaniment.
  • dispersed harmony Harmony in which the notes which form the various chords are widely dispersed.
  • forte [Italian] “Loud”.
  • allegrezza [Italian] Cheerfulness, happiness, joyfulness.
  • religioso [Italian] Religious, devout.
  • rastrum [Latin] A pen that has five points (nibs), for use in notating staff lines.