Exclamatio

What it means

The exclamatio, Latin for “exclamation,” is a figure of musical rhetoric. It transfers the exclamation of speech into music: the melody makes a striking leap or a marked turn and thereby sets a word or thought apart as an outcry.

Musical use

In the Baroque doctrine of figures, musical turns were named after the art of oratory and tied to particular expressive contents. The exclamatio stands for expressions such as joy, pain, or astonishment and occurs above all in vocal music, where it suits text passages with exclamations like “O!” or “Ah!” It is often realized by an upward leap, frequently a sixth.

The exclamatio should be distinguished from the suspiratio, which imitates a sigh through rests, and from the passus duriusculus, which expresses pain through chromatic steps. Not every large leap is an exclamatio; what matters is the connection with an exclamatory text.

Performance practice

When studying Baroque vocal music, recognise such leaps and ask which text word they stress. Then shape the leap deliberately: let it sound with impulse but without harshness, and give the target note a recognisable accent.