tessitura
Americannoun
-
tessituras,
plural
-
tessiture
plural
noun
-
the general pitch level of a piece of vocal music
an uncomfortably high tessitura
-
the compass or range of a voice
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of tessitura
1890–95; < Italian: literally, texture < Latin textūra; see texture
Explanation
If you're a singer with a remarkably wide tessitura, the range of notes that you can sing without straining is impressive. You could comfortably sing a piece of music with very high and very low notes. Without training, the average person’s tessitura is only about six consecutive notes. That doesn't mean that they can't sing other notes at all; it just means that singing lower or higher notes is a strain. A piece or passage of music also has a tessitura, the range that a singer's voice or an instrument stays within for most of the piece. A piece with a low tessitura has notes that are mostly in the lower part of a singer's or an instrument's range; one with a high tessitura has notes mostly in the higher part of a singer's or instrument's range.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
If you talk to any mezzo, they will tell you it’s very hard to sing Cherubino, because it’s quite high — not super high notes, but sitting all the time in a high tessitura.
From New York Times ● May 27, 2022
Instead, voice type is a function of tessitura and vocal weight — a woman singing low almost always sounds like a woman singing low, not like a tenor.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 25, 2021
The part is quite rangy, and for me the challenge was keeping his innocence while singing a very wide range in terms of the tessitura.
From New York Times ● Oct. 4, 2021
She also struggled, as many cellists do, with the treacherously high tessitura of the sixth suite, which was originally written for a five-stringed instrument.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 17, 2016
A song’s range concerns all of the notes in a song from lowest to highest, while the tessitura concerns the part of the register that contains the most tones of that melody.
From "Music and the Child" by Natalie Sarrazin
Comparison of children’s and adults’ vocal ranges and preferred tessituras in singing familiar songs.
From "Music and the Child" by Natalie Sarrazin
These two registers sound and feel very different, and the singer may have even have two distinct tessituras, one in each register.
From "Understanding Basic Music Theory" by Catherine Schmidt-Jones and Russel Jones
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