• @[email protected]
    10•2 days ago

    I had to look up the difference between a decrescendo and a diminuendo, and I’m still not sure why it’s not just a diminuendo.

    • EpheraEnglish
      9•2 days ago

      It’s probably a regional thing that you’re more used to diminuendo. The also-subjective version, that I got taught here in Germany, is that the hairpin notation (< and >) correspond to crescendo and decrescendo, and that diminuendo is just an alternative way of saying decrescendo.
      I’m guessing, they taught it to us that way, because just adding “de-” to negate is easy to remember. Maybe native Italians do use “diminuendo” more naturally. It certainly seems less unwieldy, because it doesn’t use the negation.

      But yeah, ultimately it’s like how English has “silent” and “quiet”, which mean essentially the same thing, but both are in use. If we hadn’t already standardized on “piano”, you’d probably find both words in English compositions, with whichever one used that the composer liked more in that position.

      • @Psythik
        4•2 days ago

        But silent and quiet mean different things.

        Silent is the absent of sound, quiet is the presence of sound at a low volume.

        • EpheraEnglish
          6•2 days ago

          I was expecting a response like that. 🙃

          You know the nuance, because you speak the language. Someone who speaks Italian might feel similarly about diminuendo and decrescendo. Personally (knowing no Italian), I always felt like diminuendo was more of an alright-slowly-become-quieter, whereas decrescendo was more of a you-need-to-be-become-less-loud-fairly-quickly. So, the decrescendo often undoes a crescendo and the diminuendo is more of a general trend over the next measures. But yeah, I am grasping at straws, since many composers will use them interchangeably (not least, because they may not speak Italian either).