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The woodwinds as a group.
Short for strumenti di legno, the woodwind section. It appears in instrumentation lists, cue indications and performance notes rather than as a staff label, since each woodwind has its own staff. Do not confuse it with col legno in string parts, which means playing with the wood of the bow.
Use it when an instruction genuinely applies to the whole woodwind choir at once — a balance note in the score, a cue in a conductor’s reduction, a remark in the preface. On the staves themselves name the individual instruments: a direction that only says legni leaves players to guess whether it concerns them.
Legni 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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