Ornament (music)

In music, ornaments are musical flourishes that are not necessary to the overall melodic (or harmonic) line, but serve to decorate or "ornament" that line. The amount of ornamentation in a piece of music can vary from quite extensive (it was often so in the Baroque period) to relatively little or even none. The word agrément is used specifically to indicate the French Baroque style of ornamentation.

Mordent

The mordent is thought of as a rapid single alternation between an indicated note, the note above (called the upper mordent, inverted mordent, or pralltriller) or below (called the lower mordent or mordent) the indicated note, and the indicated note again.

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The upper mordent is indicated by a short squiggle; the lower mordent is the same with a short vertical line through it:

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As with the trill, the exact speed with which the mordent is performed will vary according to the tempo of the piece, but at moderate tempi the above might be executed as follows:

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to a passage firstly played with lower mordents, then played without. (OGG)

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It should be noted that in the Baroque period, a Mordant (the German equivalent of mordent) was what later came to be called an inverted mordent and what is now often called a lower mordent. In the 19th century, however, the name mordent was generally applied to what is now called the upper mordent. This confusion over the meaning of the unadorned word mordent is what has led to the modern terms upper and lower mordent being used rather than mordent and inverted mordent.

Related Topics:
Baroque period - German - 19th century

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Although mordents are now thought of as just a single alternation between notes, in the Baroque period it appears that a Mordant may sometimes have been executed with more than one alternation between the indicated note and the note below, making it a sort of inverted trill.

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Also, mordents of all sorts might typically, in some periods, begin with an extra unessential note (the lesser, added note), rather than with the principal note as shown in the examples here. The same applies to trills, which in Baroque and Classical times would standardly begin with the added, upper note. Practice, notation, and nomenclature vary widely for all of these ornaments, and this article as a whole addresses an approximate nineteenth-century standard.

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A lower unessential note may or may not be chromatically raised (that is, with a natural, a sharp, or even a double sharp) to make it just one semitone lower than the principal note.

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