Every field has its working vocabulary, and music has one of the richest. When a score says legato, sforzando, or rubato, it is compressing a whole performance instruction into a single word. Learning these terms is not about memorizing trivia; it is about being able to read what a composer actually wants and, when you compose, about telling performers exactly what you want. Here is a working glossary of the techniques you will meet most often, organized by what they control.
Techniques of Articulation
Legato means smooth and connected, with no audible gap between notes. Staccato is its opposite: notes detached and shortened, marked with a dot. Tenuto asks the player to hold a note for its full value, often with slight emphasis. Marcato marks a note for strong accent, and sforzando (sfz) demands a sudden, forceful attack on a single note. String players add their own layer: pizzicato (plucking the string), arco (returning to the bow), and tremolo (rapid repetition of a single pitch that produces a trembling intensity).
Techniques of Tempo and Time
Rubato is the expressive stretching and compressing of tempo, common in Romantic piano music. Accelerando speeds the music up gradually; ritardando slows it down. A fermata suspends time entirely, holding a note beyond its written value. Syncopation shifts accents onto weak beats or off-beats, and an ostinato is a rhythmic or melodic pattern that repeats insistently while the music changes around it.
Techniques of Melody and Ornament
Ornaments decorate a melodic line. A trill alternates rapidly between a note and its upper neighbor. A mordent is a quick single alternation; a turn circles the main note with its neighbors above and below. A glissando slides continuously from one pitch to another, and vibrato adds a controlled oscillation of pitch that warms and projects a sustained tone. In vocal music, melisma stretches one syllable across many notes.
Techniques of Texture and Harmony
An arpeggio spells out a chord one note at a time rather than sounding it at once. Counterpoint combines two or more independent melodic lines, and imitation passes a melodic idea from voice to voice, as in a canon or fugue. A drone sustains a fixed pitch beneath changing material, while a pedal point does the same in the bass under shifting harmonies. Modulation is the art of moving from one key to another convincingly.
The Practice Behind the Words
Performers build these techniques through scales, chords, arpeggios, and etudes - short technical pieces that isolate one problem at a time. Bela Bartok's "Mikrokosmos," a graded series of 153 piano pieces, teaches technique musically rather than mechanically, and the etudes of Chopin and Clementi serve the same purpose at different levels. The same principle applies to your ears: every term above describes something you can learn to hear before you play it. Training that inner hearing is the focus of the ear training and musicianship courses at UreMusic.com, and it turns a vocabulary list like this one into sounds you can actually imagine.
Theory sticks when you can hear it. Flawless Ear Training trains exactly that - hearing intervals, chords, and progressions in your mind instead of calculating them on paper.
Keep Reading
Tone Color Techniques in Music • Kinds of Harmonies • The Glissando Technique for Brass
