Classify a melody's ornaments from the melody and the metre alone.
This is deliberately chord-free: a harmonizer needs to know which notes the
chords must explain before it can choose them, so nothing here may consult a
harmony. What remains is the melodic and metric evidence — stepwise approach
and departure, repeated pitches, leaps, and the relative metric weight and
length of a note against its neighbours.
The figures are recognized in the order suspension, passing, neighbor,
anticipation, appoggiatura, escape. A note is judged ornamental only when it
is metrically and rhythmically subordinate to the neighbours that frame it
(or, for the accented figures, when it leans on a stronger beat than its
approach and gives way to a resolution). A note without an adjacent
predecessor and successor has no figure to belong to and stays structural, so
the first and last notes of a phrase are always structural.
Classify a melody's ornaments from the melody and the metre alone.
This is deliberately chord-free: a harmonizer needs to know which notes the chords must explain before it can choose them, so nothing here may consult a harmony. What remains is the melodic and metric evidence — stepwise approach and departure, repeated pitches, leaps, and the relative metric weight and length of a note against its neighbours.
The figures are recognized in the order suspension, passing, neighbor, anticipation, appoggiatura, escape. A note is judged ornamental only when it is metrically and rhythmically subordinate to the neighbours that frame it (or, for the accented figures, when it leans on a stronger beat than its approach and gives way to a resolution). A note without an adjacent predecessor and successor has no figure to belong to and stays structural, so the first and last notes of a phrase are always structural.