Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun plural (Mus.) Little flowers of ornament introduced into a melody by a singer or player.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun music Little "flowers" of ornament introduced into a melody by a singer or player.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Italian, plural of fioritura a flowering.

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Examples

  • The other, who played the piffero, was a man of middle age, stout, vigorous, with a forest of tangled black hair, and dark quick eyes that were fixed steadily on the Virgin, while he blew and vexed the little brown pipe with rapid runs and nervous fioriture, until great drops of sweat dripped from its round open mouth.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859 Various

  • The ornaments in the body of an air are known as abbellimenti or fioriture; those at its close, as cadenze.

    Style in Singing W. E. Haslam

  • They have already mown the hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where no flowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to those brilliant patches of diapered fioriture.

    New Italian sketches John Addington Symonds 1866

  • Theodore lavished on every day inexhaustible fioriture of enjoyment, and he delighted to vary the transports of passion by the soft languor of those hours of repose when souls soar so high that they seem to have forgotten all bodily union.

    At the Sign of the Cat & Racket Honor�� de Balzac 1824

  • Various kinds of trills, grace notes, runs, and other species of fioriture, or vocal somersaults, were introduced in every song, in such profusion that the song itself was at last barely recognizable; and this kind of stuff the audiences of that time applauded frantically.

    Chopin and Other Musical Essays Henry Theophilus Finck 1890

  • Even more important was the change which he introduced into the manner of singing fioriture or florid music.

    The Opera A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions of all Works in the Modern Repertory. J. A. [Commentator] Fuller-Maitland 1892

  • They have already mown the hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where no flowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to those brilliant patches of diapered fioriture.

    Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series John Addington Symonds 1866

  • I was sure that I had known many women as charming and as handsome as she, about whom much less noise had been made; and I was convinced that her singer was factitious and literary, and that there are half a dozen stanzas in Wordsworth that speak more to the soul than the whole collection of his fioriture.

    A Little Tour of France Henry James 1879

  • If it were possible, we would describe the quality of that voice, so pure, so sweet, so fine, so whole and all-pervading, in its lowest breathings and minutest fioriture as well as in its strongest volume.

    Life of Hon. Phineas T. Barnum 1891

  • Nevertheless there is so much excellent music in the best of them, that it would not be strange if the course of time should bring them once more into favour, provided always that singers were forthcoming capable of singing the elaborate fioriture with which they abound.

    The Opera A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions of all Works in the Modern Repertory. J. A. [Commentator] Fuller-Maitland 1892

Comments

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  • ...where thrushes were singing so richly, with such sonorous force, such fluty fioriture that one could not endure the agony of consciousness, the filth of life, the loss, the loss, the loss.

    - Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor.

    May 17, 2008