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An upbeat — one or more notes that precede the first downbeat of a phrase. The Greek/English equivalent of Auftakt.
Many melodies begin with an anacrusis rather than on the downbeat. The anacrusis creates forward momentum and a sense of arrival. When writing melodies, experiment with both anacrusic and downbeat openings — they have fundamentally different characters.
Beethoven, “Für Elise” (Bagatelle in A minor, WoO 59): the famous opening E–D-sharp is an anacrusis of two sixteenth notes; the first downbeat falls on the E that follows.
Anacrusis is one of 1760 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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