There isn’t such a thing as “absolute dynamics” in the same way that there is absolute pitch. I mention this because I mostly want to consider how composers use the fff marking and why. I’ve played that piece on half a dozen instruments and never deployed all the stops available on any of them, but neither did I feel I was depriving the listener of full organ sound. Even a big organ work like Bach’s B-minor Prelude and Fugue S.544 doesn’t need them, because pro organo pleno says it all at the beginning. From psst to ffft and beyond: Everything you always wanted to know about -issississimos, piano and forte, from BMInt’s resident Deep Thought.ĭynamic markings like piano and forte go all the way back to Gabrieli’s 1597 Sonata pian e forte and Vincenzo Capirola (1474 – after 1548), but the earliest scores in which I can find p and f are of Baroque keyboard music, and even then I can’t be sure that it was not a 19 th-century editor who put them there.
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