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Fast, rapid.
Used as a tempo heading or within English directions (Quick, Quickly, Quick march), printed above the staff; as a heading it holds until the next tempo word. Its comparative appears in relative phrases such as rather quicker and becoming gradually quicker.
Also spelled: quickly
Largely interchangeable with Fast, though Quick has a brisker, lighter ring and is idiomatic in march and dance headings. The comparative, quicker, is handy for relative changes within a piece. Without a metronome figure a reader will treat it as roughly allegro; add one if the speed is critical.
Quick 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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