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 on 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 they 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 the 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 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 trills is a matter of musical style and isn't notated. I've shown one possible interpretation, but they can be played faster or slower, timed to the music's rhythm or played with independant timing.

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

Mordents

Another way to ornament a note is to briefly play the note above or below the parent note slightly after it starts, called a 'mordent'. The 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 eight 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.

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 eight as shown above would be equivalent to a mordent on a quarter note.

To start, I'd suggest practising mordents on a few notes and using them 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 to notate mordents in sheet music, as is shown below. The general 'mordent' means to use either kind as you wish, and there are notations for the upper/lower variations specifically.

This idea can be varied in many ways. For example, 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 used to decorate a central note by splitting it into four, introducing the notes above and below, and finishing on the central note. Two variations are shown below in graphical notation:

• The one on the left shows a standard four-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 on 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. This means the turn would have a 16th-note rhythm, and eighth notes would have a 32nd-note rhythm.

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

I'd recommend looking through your music for suitable notes and 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 is 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 four equally timed notes of a turn, a roll is constructed of three 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 notes 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 and 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 the symbols can be tricky, as their meanings have 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. As a result, their use has become much less common in recent art music, with composers preferring to write out ornamentation explicitly.

Highland bagpipe music uses appoggiaturas to notate an assortment of standardised embellishments, the intended performance of which is mostly not knowable from the notation. Folk musicians sometimes use them to notate fingered articulations.

The best way to learn how to perform them as intended is to listen to a performance, consult performance guidelines for a given genre/era, or talk to someone experienced with a given musical idiom, era, or composer.

Acciaccaturas

The other kind of grace note is called an 'acciaccatura'. It is written as a small note with a slash, and its meaning is much less ambiguous. An 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 in tune, I'd recommend starting by practising slowly to internalise the required 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 examples applied to music in Ocarina articulation and ornamentation applied. Also, listening to performances is a great idea.

These are not an exhaustive list of all possible ornaments that an ocarina can perform. two more options are pulsing a note using a tongue roll, similar to how a rolled ‘R’ is performed in some languages, and multiphonics, created by ‘singing’ or ‘humming’ one note while fingering another one.

It is also possible to ornament a melody through melodic variation, in which you alter the notes of a melody to create ornamental variations.