PIANISSIMO • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Pianissimo

"Pianissimo" Quotes from Famous Books

... unpretentious melody. After the thunder and the lightning comes the still, small voice. Who ever before thought of comparing the roar of the swiftly passing motor-cars with the sweet singing of the stationary bird? Was there ever in a musical composition a more startling change from fortissimo to pianissimo? ...

— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... where Beethoven marked it to cease. In diminuendos and accelerandos and ritenutos he was just as faithful. In the softer portions his sforzandos were not irrelevant explosions, but slight extra accents: he made microscopic distinctions between piano and pianissimo; he achieved the most difficult feat of keeping his band at a level forte through long passages without a symptom of breaking out into fortissimo. His players treated the stiffest passages in the "Dutchman" overture as if they were baby's play; and I detected ...

— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... steel was like a tonic; heart and blood responded immediately. Its discovery had been a fortunate chance, for again the illumination in the west died down the final pianissimo before the full crash of the orchestra—and the darkness ...

— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... having just had to change the plates of my "Book of Prefaces," a book of purely literary criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in order to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure upon the woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to avoid burdening it with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal nature. So deciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the unquenchable vanity of the intellectual snob asserting ...

— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... singer. The focal point of the breath, that forms simultaneously the attack and the body of the tone, by the operation of the abdominal breath pressure against the chest, is always firmly placed on, beneath, or behind the nose. Without body even the finest pianissimo has no significance. The very highest unmixed head tones are an exception, and they can express nothing. There can be no body expected in them. Their soaring quality of sound endures no pressure, and consequently ...

— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann

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