Diminution - Diminution As Embellishment

Diminution As Embellishment

Diminution is a form of embellishment or melodic variation in which a long note or a series of long notes is divided into shorter, usually melodic, values, as in the similar practices of breaking or division in England, passaggio in Italy, double in France and glosas or diferencias in Spain. Thoroughly documented in written sources of the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries, with a remarkable flowering in Venice from about 1580–1620, diminution is an integral aspect of modern performance practice. Donington describes the consequences of failing to add "necessary figuration" as "disastrous".

The substantial Italian literature of the 16th and early 17th century begins with the Fontegara of Silvestro Ganassi (1535) and includes the treatises and compositions of Diego Ortiz (Trattado de Glosas - 1553), Giovanni Maffei, Girolamo Dalla Casa, Giovanni Bassano, Riccardo Rogniono, Giovanni Battista Bovicelli, Aurelio Virgiliano and Francesco Rognoni Taeggio. Notable English works include The Division-Violist of Christopher Simpson (1659), The Division-Violin (Playford, 1684) and The Division Flute (Walsh, c.1706). Der Fluyten Lust-hof of Jacob van Eyck (Amsterdam, 1646) is a huge collection of diminutions.

In Schenkerian analysis a diminution is a division, rather than a diminishing is a prolongation or expansion, "the process by which an interval formed by notes of longer value is expressed in notes of smaller value," see nonchord tone.