Screaming

What it means

Schreiend is a German performance marking and calls for a loud, penetrating sound reminiscent of a scream. What is meant is an expression that deliberately crosses the boundaries of beautiful tone: glaring, violent, without roundness.

The marking is comparatively unusual and is encountered above all in the music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which ugly, distorted sounds too belong to the expressive repertoire. It concerns tone colour and dynamics at once.

Schreiend differs from fortissimo, which designates only volume, through its tonal quality: a fortissimo can be round and full, a screaming tone is glaring. It differs from schneidend through its violence — sharp can also be soft, screaming cannot.

In the notation

The word stands above the staff at the point from which it applies, often together with powerful dynamics, a high register, and accents. In vocal parts it designates a tone production beyond customary singing, occasionally reaching as far as a spoken or shouted tone.

Musical use

The instruction is used in sections of the utmost agitation: at climaxes, in dramatic scenes, in music depicting despair or violence. In twentieth-century orchestral music it stands over woodwind and brass parts in an extreme register that are deliberately to sound glaring.

The instruction calls for a glaring, penetrating sound that deliberately oversteps the bounds of euphony. It stands above all in the music of late Romanticism and Expressionism, for instance in Mahler. The instruments are often led into extreme registers for this, and the dynamics lie at fortissimo.

Performance practice

Look for the expression in the tone colour and in the register, not in physical exertion, which harms the instrument or the voice. Singers should not press the sound out of the throat but produce it through support and resonance. Keep the intonation as exact as possible. And use the effect deliberately — it carries only if the preceding section has left room for the intensification.