(It.: ‘seek the note’).
In the 17th and early 18th centuries, indication for a singer to approach an initial pitch from below, sliding up to the principal tone. Bovicelli (1594) instructs singers to begin ‘a third or a fourth below according to the consonance of the other parts, especially the contralto, where the soprano may easily find the unison’. Caccini (1601) writes that some singers begin a phrase a 3rd below the notated pitch (‘l’intonazione della voce’) but advises against it as the practice is discordant with many harmonies; however, he frequently notates this approach in his songs. Bernhard (1649) may be the first to use the term ‘cercar della nota’, defining it as ‘a searching out of notes … used either at the beginning or during the course of a phrase. At the beginning of a phrase, one sings the note immediately beneath the initial note very briefly and softly, then glides from this quite imperceptibly to the initial note’. Later theorists to define this term include W.M. Mylius (Rudimenta musices, 1686) and J.G. Walther (Praecepta, 1708). When ‘cercar della nota’ is used in the middle of a phrase there can be overlap with ‘anticipatione della nota’, where in passages moving by step a fraction of one note is given over to an anticipation of the next, and ‘anticipatione della syllaba’, where one note is divided in order to take on the syllable that belongs to the following one. See also Portamento.
F. Neumann: Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music (Princeton, 1978, 3/1983)
ELLEN T. HARRIS