Stretto
The term stretto (plural: stretti) comes from the Italian past participle of stringere, and means "narrow", "tight", or "close".[2]
In music the Italian term stretto has two distinct meanings:
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J. S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier
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(1) In a fugue, stretto (German: Engführung) is the imitation of the subject in close succession, so that the answer enters before the subject is completed.[3]
Stretto is typically employed near the end of a fugue, where, by increasing the textural intensity of what otherwise is already a texturally intense style of writing (i.e., fugue), the 'piling-up' of two or more temporally off-set statements of the subject (i.e., stretto) signals the arrival of the fugue's conclusion in climactic fashion, as may be seen in the Fugue No. 1 in C major, BWV 846, of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. In other instances, stretto serves to display contrapuntal prowess, as in the Fugue No. 9 in E major, BWV 878, where Bach follows a traditional exposition (subject accompanied by countersubject) with a counterexposition in which the subject accompanies itself, in stretto, followed by the countersubject accompanying itself.
(2) In non-fugal compositions, a stretto (also sometimes spelled stretta) is a passage, often at the end of an aria or movement, in faster tempo.[3][4] Examples include: the end of the last movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; measure 227 of Chopin's Ballade No. 3; measures 16 and 17, of his Prelude No. 4 in E minor; and measure 25 of his Etude Op. 10, No. 12, "The Revolutionary."
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Benward & Saker (2009). Music in Theory and Practice: Volume II, p.54. Eighth Edition. ISBN 978-0-07-310188-0.
- ^ WordReference.com Dizionario Italiano-Inglese. Accessed 23 November 2009.
- ^ a b Apel, Willi, ed. (1969). Harvard Dictionary of Music, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN 674375017.
- ^ Oxford American Dictionaries
