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The brass as a group.
Italian for the brass section (horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba). Like legni it turns up in instrumentation lists, cue notes and conductors’ remarks rather than as a staff label, since each brass instrument has its own staff.
Useful for an instruction that covers all the brass at once — a balance note, a cue, an offstage group. In the parts, though, every player needs to see which instruments are meant, so spell them out there. Orchestral usage counts the horns among the ottoni, even though in chamber music the horn often sits with the woodwinds, as in the wind quintet.
Ottoni 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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