Why Does That Squiggle Above the Note Matter? It Is an Instruction to Decorate
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
A small symbol over a note tells the player to add extra notes around it, and exactly which notes and how many has been argued about for three hundred years.
What the symbol asks for
The mark instructs the player to leave the written note briefly, touch a neighbouring note and return, all within the time the written note occupies. The standard form goes to the note above and back, and a version with a line struck through the symbol goes to the note below and back instead, though which is which varies between national traditions and periods, which is the first of the difficulties. The whole figure occupies the beginning of the written note's time rather than being squeezed in before it, so the decoration falls on the beat and the written note sounds slightly late.
The family it belongs to
Several ornaments do related jobs and were notated by similar marks:
- •The trill, alternating rapidly between two notes for the whole duration
- •The turn, going above, back, below and back again
- •The appoggiatura, a leaning note taking time from the main one
- •The acciaccatura, a very short note crushed against it
- •The slide, approaching the note from below through neighbours
- •Combinations of these, marked by compound symbols
Why nobody agrees how to play them
Ornament signs were never fully standardised, and reading them correctly requires knowing when and where a piece was written. Composers published tables explaining their own usage, and those tables disagree with each other, which is direct evidence that no common practice existed. National conventions differed, with French, German and Italian practice diverging on where the figure starts and how many notes it contains. The same composer's usage changed over a career. And much of the repertoire survives only in later editions where an editor has silently standardised or added marks, so a modern score may record an editor's opinion rather than a composer's instruction.
Why ornaments existed at all
Decorating a written line looks like optional embellishment and served purposes that were structural. On a harpsichord a note cannot be sustained or made louder, so a long note simply dies away, and adding movement to it keeps the sound alive and marks it as important, which is the job dynamics do on a piano. Ornaments also create and resolve dissonance against the bass at exactly the moment the harmony needs it, which is why an ornament removed from a baroque line leaves the harmony sounding flat. And they let a performer shape a phrase individually, in a period when the written score was understood as a framework rather than as a complete specification.
How performers decide
Given that ambiguity, the practical approach rests on evidence rather than on a rule book. Performers consult the treatises of the period and place, and particularly any table the composer published. They examine the harmony, since an ornament that creates a dissonance against the bass frequently indicates which neighbouring note was intended. They consider the tempo, since a fast passage cannot accommodate many extra notes. They look at parallel passages elsewhere in the same work, where a figure may be written out in full. And where the evidence runs out they choose, which is why two informed performances of the same bar can differ and both be defensible.
The takeaway
The mark instructs a player to touch a neighbouring note and return within the written note's own time, so the decoration falls on the beat rather than before it. Which neighbour and how many notes varies by country, period and composer, and the published tables of the time disagree with each other. Performers decide from treatises, harmony, tempo and parallel passages, and informed readings still differ.