(It.: ‘held’; past participle of tenere: ‘to hold’, ‘hold back’, ‘restrain’).
A performance instruction normally applied to single notes or groups of notes, also abbreviated to ten. It can denote either a holding of individual notes to their full length or a complete interruption of the metre. C.P.E. Bach (1753) stated that ‘Notes which are neither staccato nor legato nor sostenuto are held for half their value unless the word “ten.” is placed over them, in which case they have to be sustained’; D.G. Türk (Clavierschule, 1789) wrote that ‘When playing notes in the ordinary manner, that is, neither staccato nor legato, the finger should be lifted shortly before the written value of the note requires it … Where single notes are supposed to be held for their full value they have to be marked ten. or tenuto’. The predominantly detached style of playing which made this necessary seems to have gone out of favour around 1800; but it is presumably in this sense that the first note of each of the repeated-note patterns in the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is marked ten. In the second sense it is often used for a delay of the metre in bravura operatic lines, particularly to indicate that the upbeat must be held back; there are many instances in Verdi. The term has a distinguished position as one of the first to be used in music: according to Notker’s letter to Lambertus (GerbertS, i, 95f) the Romanus letter t meant ‘trahere vel tenere debere’, though Aribo asserted that it meant ‘tarditas’.
For bibliography see Tempo and expression marks.
DAVID FALLOWS