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.