Dynamics

   There is another set of Italian terms that helps determine how loudly or how quietly you play the music. Pianissimo (pp) means that you play the music very quietly. The decibel is the way you know how intense the sound is, but most pieces of music just use the symbols. Piano is the next "level" up from pianissimo. The suffix,-issimo, means "very."

In the same way, it world with forte and fortissimo. Forte means loud while fortissimo means very loud. If you want something to be even louder, you would call it forississimo. Mezzo piano and mezzo forte are in between piano and forte. "Mezzo" means moderate so, when you add forte, it means moderately loud. Mezzo piano means moderately soft.

  

Tempo

   The tempo of a piece of music tells us how fast or slowly we should play the music. On the right, I provided a chart of the terms and their definitions. The terms are all in Italian and some of them we can see English words that we may recognize. For example, accelerando means to speed up. We have the word accelerate in English that means the same thing.

   Moderato, looks like moderate, means to play at a medium pace. Other terms, like grave, can be easier to remember. The word looks exactly like our word, grave. We can remember it by thinking that the corpses decompose very, very slowly. For some of the other terms, you just have to learn and possibly make your own mnemonic devices.