Loading…
Loading…
Dying away — getting both slower and softer simultaneously.
Printed between or above the staves as calando, cal. or poco cal., usually at the end of a phrase and sometimes followed by a dashed line. It affects both tempo and loudness, so a reader expects a tempo or a new dynamic to follow; in Classical piano music it typically leads into a softer dynamic.
Abbreviations: cal.
Calando combines diminuendo and ritardando into a single instruction. Use it when a passage should fade to nothing in both volume and energy — endings of sections, transitions to silence, moments of exhaustion.
Mozart, Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K. 332, third movement (Allegro assai), m. 32: “calando”, between p in the bar before and pp two bars later.
Calando 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.
Browse the full dictionary →