Incalzando

As Printed on a Score

Printed above the staff where the pressing begins, and usually answered within a bar or two by a ritenuto, rallentando or a tempo. It is almost always written out in full.

How Composers Use It

Incalzando means “pursuing” or “urging on”: tempo and intensity rise together, as if the phrase were chasing something. It sits between stringendo (a tightening of pace) and affrettando (hurry); its flavour is emotional insistence. Tchaikovsky answers it with a ritenuto two bars later in the Pathétique — a good model for using it as phrase shaping, a surge and a holding back, rather than as a lasting change of speed.

Example

Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”), first movement, piccolo part, m. 93: “incalzando”, answered two bars later by “ritenuto” as the dynamics swell from pp to mf.

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