Dynamics & Expression
Cantabile
Pronounced kahn-TAH-bee-leh
Cantabile means 'in a singing style': play the melody smoothly and expressively, shaping it as a singer would, with a sustained, connected tone.
Cantabile means "singable" or "songlike". It asks an instrumentalist to play like a singer: a smooth, connected, sustained melody, shaped in breaths, with a warm tone that carries over the accompaniment. It appears both as an expression word below the staff and as part of a tempo heading, as in Andante cantabile or Adagio cantabile.
Cantabile in real music
The slow movement of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata is marked Adagio cantabile: a long melody in the middle of the keyboard that the pianist must make sing over its own accompaniment. Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1 has a famous slow movement titled Andante cantabile.
How to make a piano sing
The piano is a percussion instrument at heart: every note starts to fade the moment it is struck. Playing cantabile means hiding that.
- Connect the notes. Play legato, so each note lasts until the next begins. Use fingering that makes the connection possible, and the sustain pedal where needed.
- Shape the line. Let the melody grow toward its high point and relax after it, as a voice does. A long note needs the next note matched to its fading sound, not to its first attack.
- Voice the melody. Play the melody notes a little louder than the accompaniment; see Voicing and Balance.
- Breathe. At the end of a phrase, lift slightly, as a singer takes a breath, then start the next phrase fresh. Our Phrasing handout shows how.
Our Match the terms: level 4 sheet defines cantabile as "in a singing style".
The Musical terms & signs chart lists cantabile with the other character words.
Common questions
What does cantabile mean in music?
In a singing style: play the melody smoothly and expressively, with a connected, sustained tone, as if a singer were performing it.
Practice it: free worksheets
Match the terms: level 4Draw a line from each term to its meaning. All-new words — rounds one and up are Exercises 08–11. The colors tell you what kind of word it is, but each color has several meanings on the right, so read carefully.
Musical terms & signsThe words and symbols a piano score uses to tell you how loud, how fast and how to play each note. Most of the words are Italian. The colors match the term-matching exercises (Exercises 08–11, 74 and 75).
Voicing and BalanceThe piano plays many notes at once, but the listener should hear one of them first: the melody. Voicing means choosing which note sings out. Balance means keeping everything else softer underneath it, so the tune floats on top.
PhrasingMusic speaks in sentences. A long curved line over several measures — the phrase mark — shows where one musical sentence starts and where it ends.