In Scarlatti's Sonata in A minor Kp 175 on the Grade 8 sylabus Tremulo is written over some notes. What does tremUlo mean?

The the editor couldn't spell?
Seriously, a quick Google and: "tremulo" appears to be the Spanish for "tremolo" - and as Scarlatti spent much time in Spain, perhaps he wrote his directions in Spanish just to confuse people

Well, yes, I had thought that it might mean tremolo. There is also an ornament written above though, and I can't get my head round how it is physically possible to tremolo on about 10 notes and play the ornament all in the space of a crotchet.

Oxford University have published a journal about it


"Scarlatti's tremulo
Emilia Fadini's relating of Scarlatti's tremulo to the. repeated notes ending trills (and called ... where tremulo appears above tr (five times). But rather ...
em.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/XIX/1/91.pdf - Similar pages


Only problem is that it costs £35 for a student subscription to the journals....

Yes...That would be a nice resource to have access to. Sadly I'm not a student, so it's an astronomic amount to pay to find out this tremulo thing.

I am suprised that this hasn't been asked before actually, someone else MUST have taught it/played it.

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I don't have the AB edition, I'm referring to a freebie Internet edition (from sheetmusicarchive.net if you want to see my frame of reference) but in those bars, you have to use the thumb to play two notes - for instance, in bar 25, the thumb would play the lower g and a. That leaves you fingers 4 and 5 free to play the ornament.

Ornaments are only ever played on the note by which they are written. If a piece requires a double ornament, there will be two ornament signs in place - one by each note to be ornamented. So in this case, only ornament the top note (with fingers 4 and 5 as discussed above) whilst holding the other notes down.

And finally, if you don't actually know what ornament to play, it seems an up mordent would be a reasonable choice.

thanks! Does yours have tremulo on as well? that is the bit that is getting me confused, I'm not actually playing it, I'm teaching it. and the edition is good for fingering and all ornaments are written out meticulously. They change between upper and lower mordents alternately in that section.

The version I have that I mentioned has been somewhat butchered, turning everything into a mordent. Thankfully, I do have access to the article mentioned a few posts earlier - ATHENS accounts are perq of the job .

The answer is, in bar 27, where there are loads of notes, do a straightforwards mordent - as discussed in my previous post. In bar 28, where there aren't so many notes, and the chord is labelled 'trem', hold the thumb on the bottom two notes and repeat the top note three times in quick succession (fingered 4, then 3, then 2). It has the same rhythm as the mordent - two quick, one long (two demisemiquavers followed by a semiquaver).

Ahhhh!

Thanks SO much! I just tried that out and it works really quite successfully.

In the Schirmer edition (Sixty Sonatas in Two Volumes), Ralph Kirkpatrick in his preface says: "What is the meaning of the term Tremulo? Apparently the same thing as a trill."