Ornamentation: trills, turns, mordents and grace notes on the ocarina

The first group of ornaments that we learned, vibrato, slides and note shaping, are generally grouped by their use of pitch bending to create ornamentation. Trills, turns, mordents and grace notes by comparison take a different approach. These ornaments all involve adding other notes around a central note.

As usual I'm using C fingerings, but the equivalent fingerings work ocarinas in any key.

Trills

Trills consist of a rapid alternation of two notes, performed by raising and lowering a finger. In some respects they are similar to vibrato, being rhythmic and applied over the duration of a note, but sound very different.

I'd recommend learning to trill one finger at a time, using a metronome as a reference to keep the notes even. First, let's play a slow trill between G and F using the right index finger.

• Start on G and hold this for the duration of the first metronome click.
• Switch down to F and hold for the second metronome click.
• Repeat, cycling between these two notes for as long as you wish.

As this starts to get easy, gradually work up the tempo. Once you've maxed out your metronome at one note per click, switch to a subdivision into two, playing 'G', 'A' in one click.

• Try to minimise the movement of finger. It should be large enough so that the note isn't unduly flat, but not so much that it limits your speed.
• Also, remember to vary your breath pressure to keep the two notes in tune.
• Keep increasing the tempo, and switching to increasingly small subdivisions as your skill improves.

In notation, a trill is indicated by the symbol 'tr' placed above a note:

Trills typically start from the note above the written note, lasting for its duration before ending on the written note. Have a go at playing the trills in this:

As you gain experience with trills, start working on the trills of other notes, and look for opportunities to perform them in the music you play. All notes can be trilled except the high F, including on cross fingered notes, although it's usually better to do so by finding an alternate fingering or half holing, instead of alternating multiple fingers.

The exact timing of the trill is a matter of musical style and isn't written in notation. I've shown one possible interpretation, but they can be played faster, slower, timed to the rhythm of the music or completely separate from it.

Trills can also change in their speed over their duration, similar to vibrato, and I'd suggest listening to performances to develop a sense of how to use them in practice.

Mordents

Another way of ornamenting notes is to briefly play the note above or below the parent note slightly after it starts, called a Mordent. There two possible kinds of mordent are called an upper mordent, where the brief note is higher, and a lower mordent when it is lower. Both are shown here in graphical notation.

Learning to play mordents can be approached much the same as trills, using subdivisions. For instance, if you consider a beat split it into 8 subdivisions as shown above:

• Start out practising this at a slow tempo, one subdivision per beat.
• Once that gets easy, speed it up by increasing the tempo with a metronome, or switching to two or more subdivisions per beat.

There are many ways of approaching the timing of mordents. They often have a duration of about a 32nd note, and in that case the split into 8 as shown above would be equivalent to a mordent on a quarter note.

I'd suggest practising it on a few notes to start with, and try putting them to use in some of the music you play. They can be effective for ornamenting a note after an ascending or descending motion for instance.

There are several ways of notating mordents in sheet music, shown below. The general 'mordent' means to use either kind as you wish, and there are notations for the upper / lower variations specifically.

There are many ways one could vary on this idea. Like, how would it sound if the mordent note were longer or shorter? Or what about delaying it to occur in the middle of the parent note, or at the end?

Turns

Turns are multiple note ornaments where we decorate a central note by splitting it into 4 and introducing the note above and below, before finishing on the central note. Two variations are shown below in graphical notation:

• The one on the left shows a standard 4 note turn.
• The right one shows a turn with an added prefix note. In music they are often preceded by another note of the same pitch, and you may find that easier for practice as well.

To play a basic turn on G, put on a metronome, and move through the following sequence in time with the click:

1. The note above (A).
2. The parent note (G).
3. The note below (F).
4. The parent note (G).

And in standard notation:

Learning and practising turns is much the same as the other ornaments discussed previously, start with playing them of a few notes, and gradually work up the tempo.

In principle, turns can be performed on a note of any duration, but are often seen on quarter notes, meaning the turn would have a 16th note rhythm, and eighth notes which would have a 32nd note rhythm.

In sheet music, turns are often written out, but can also be indicated with the '~' sign above the note:

I'd recommend looking through your music for suitable notes, practice applying turns to them. It isn't difficult to find audio examples of these in flute music.

Turns and rolls are not the same

I feel it important to mention that a turn is not the same thing as a roll, an ornament common in Irish traditional music. In contrast with the 4 equally timed notes of a turn, a roll is constructed of 3 notes articulated using a cut followed by a strike.

As we explored, cuts and strikes are articulations performed by briefly sounding a higher or lower pitch. Their duration does not change with tempo, and played well they don't sound like 'notes' in their own right.

At high tempos a turn and a roll can start to sound similar, but are very different when slowed down.

Roll

Turn

Grace Notes

Grace notes are essentially an ornamental notation used to separate the critical notes of a melody from optional ornamental details. There are two different kinds of grace note that are interpreted differently, appoggiaturas and acciaccaturas.

Appoggiaturas

Appoggiaturas are written as small note symbols placed before the note they are ornamenting, like this:

They are performed by taking the written value of the grace note, subtracting that duration from the start of the note they are ornamenting. The two examples above can be performed as follows:

You'll also encounter music where multiple grace notes are written before a note, for example in the following tune:

As the two grace notes have the same duration as the note they are ornamenting, a common way of performing this is to treat the three notes as a triplet:

The above are the generally accepted interpretations in modern art music, but interpreting these can be tricky as the meaning of these symbols has changed over time. They also mean different things in different musical idioms.

Groups of grace notes can have very esoteric interpretations which are impossible to ascertain from the notation alone, due to which their use has become much less common in recent art music, preferring to instead write out ornamentation explicitly.

Highland bagpipe music uses appoggiaturas to notate an assortment of standardised embellishments, the intended performance of which mostly isn't knowable from the notation, and folk musicians sometimes use them to notate fingered articulations.

The best way of knowing how to perform them as intended tends to be by listening to a performance, looking for performance guidelines for a given genre / era, or talking to someone experienced with a given musical idiom, era, or composer.

Acciaccaturas

The other kind of grace note is called an acciaccatura. They are written as a small note with a slash and their meaning is much less ambiguous. Acciaccatura should be performed 'as fast as possible' preceding the note being ornamented, stealing time from the previous note.

But do we mean a very brief note that is in tune, or something that is essentially a fingered articulation? Both are valid interpretations and it would be best to experiment to see what sounds appropriate.

If you'd like to learn to play very brief notes that are in tune, I'd recommend starting to practice slowly to internalise the needed pressure and fingering change, then speed it up. Try to keep your finger movements minimal, but not so close to the holes as to affect the pitch.

Closing notes

I'd recommend picking a few of these ornaments, learning them slowly, and experimenting with their use in some of the music you play.

There are some example of these applied to music in Ocarina articulation and ornamentation applied, and listening to performances is a great idea.

A similar idea to the ornaments explored here is melodic variation, where you alter the notes of a melody to create ornamental variations. However it isn't something that I can start to approach here because how one would approach it is closely tied with the genre of music you're playing.

It isn't difficult to find guidance regarding variation in Jazz, Irish traditional, and other musical idioms.