IT martellato articulation advanced Support my free tools
hammered or strongly accented; mart. is attested in instrument-specific contexts
- Abbreviation
- mart.
How is martellato played?
Produce a hammered, sharply defined attack using the technique appropriate to the instrument. On bowed strings, traditional martelé realisation prepares pressure at the string, releases it into a biting separate stroke and commonly stops before the next note; exact separation and preparation change with tempo. On handbells, martellato instead denotes a table-damped strike, while keyboard usage can indicate a percussive touch. A wedge or the older combination of a dot with sforzando can prompt a related result but is not the textual abbreviation. The term does not universally prescribe one rest, maximum speed or dynamic, and Tourte-era bow history contextualises string technique rather than defining the word.
How does martellato sound?
Each note bites sharply at the start and then stops, giving a strong, hammered, accented attack.
In context
Italian martellato means hammered and French martelé names the related bowed-string stroke. ABC Musiknotation, a music-education publication and a specialist handbell reference independently expand mart.; current use is sufficiently instrument-specific that the score’s legend and instrumentation must control interpretation. The baseline’s string-pressure, separate-bow, stopped-stroke, wedge, older dot-plus-sforzando, speed and Tourte topics are retained here as qualified string-history context rather than universal rules.