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With abandon.
Printed above the staff or over the voice, usually at a climactic or passionate phrase. It describes manner for the passage until a new character marking.
It asks the performer to let go: free, uninhibited delivery, with rubato and full expressive commitment — the French counterpart of con abbandono. Use it where control should seem to give way to feeling, and pair it with a dynamic, since abandon can be soft as well as loud. Overuse undercuts it; save it for a real release.
Boulanger, Clairières dans le ciel, “Deux ancolies”, voice, m. 18: “avec abandon”, while the piano in the same bar is marked “soutenu et vibrant”.
Avec abandon is one of 1755 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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