ornamentation summary

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Below is the article summary. For the full article, see ornamentation.

ornamentation, In music, the addition of notes for expressive and aesthetic purposes. For example, a long note may be ornamented by repetition or by alternation with a neighboring note (“trill”); a skip to a nonadjacent note can be filled in with the intervening notes; or the resolution of a dissonance (see consonance and dissonance), because of its inevitability, can be delayed.