Wordwatch: Crescendo

“The Today programme carries an interesting item about how jackdaws decide when to take flight. They judge by the amount of noise from the jackdaw crowd.  If it reaches a crescendo, they fly” – The Spectator, 28 May 2022

I suppose the word “crescendo” has to be counted as a technical term, though it’s familiar enough and used frequently in precisely the way it’s used here. I never cease to be surprised, though, at how writers who must know what it means employ it as though it’s an abstruse term they can’t quite get their heads around.

It derives from the Latin verb crescere, to grow, which is equally familiar from its derivative adjective “crescent”, a term that describes the moon as it is “growing.” The French croissant is the same word and means the same thing though it is applied by transference to a type of pastry that has the crescent-moon shape. (The “-escent” ending is of course equally familiar in “adolescent”, where the “growing” is even more obviously a process in time.)

“Crescendo”, being a musical term, is Italian – which developed as the technical language of music when that art-form was reaching its first maturity in the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance. It means the same thing: “growing”, and came into prominent use in the mid-eighteenth century when certain virtuoso orchestras, like that at the court of the Elector Palatine Carl Theodor at Mannheim, under its director the composer Johann Stamitz, began to expand the range and richness of the orchestra’s vocabulary.

Stamitz’s orchestra was unusually large and introduced novel and startling acoustic effects: the “Mannheim rocket” and the “Mannheim sigh” became important features of the music that embodied the stylistic transition from Baroque (Bach and Handel) in the first half of the century to Classical (Haydn and Mozart) in the second.

Perhaps the most enduring of these effects was a steady increase in the dynamic – the volume of sound – of the music, often building towards a climax followed by a “diminuendo”, the contrary process of diminishing or reducing the volume. This very significant contribution to the emotional range of orchestral music, so much used even today that we take it for granted, was known as the ‘Mannheim crescendo’.

So a “crescendo” is a progression over time, which may “reach” a conclusion in the form of a climax (a forte), or not. The “crescendo” itself cannot be said to be “reached” since it is by definition a transition towards something else. But it’s all too often used, as in my example above, as though it describes a fixed point in time, like a climax.

The word has come also to denote a shape. The “crescent” moon has the curved, horned shape that the word has come to imply. Once the moon has outgrown that phase it becomes a half-moon and then, a night or two later, a “gibbous” moon. This word comes from the Latin “gibbus”, a hump, and means “protuberant” – and by extension “pregnant”.

And if you’re wondering how to pronounce it, which I have often done, its first consonant is a hard “g”, not, as we should expect, the soft “dj” sound usually encountered in words derived from the Latin. The OED notes this pronunciation as an exceptional usage and offers no special explanation for it. It has evidently just evolved over the course of time in common usage which, as we know, takes little notice of grammarians’ rules.      

To revert to the theme of a crescendo among animal noises: I am reminded of a warm midsummer night some years ago when I stood at midnight in the Long Walk at Windsor, listening to the extraordinary babble of a herd of red deer in a nearby valley. The racket grew louder and louder and suddenly stopped, when the entire herd suddenly galloped from the valley they had been chattering in, across the mile-long avenue of the Long Walk, to another field on the other side.

There they remained, silent, for a time; but I’ve no doubt they restarted their conversation, and another prolonged crescendo, shortly afterwards. This seems to be a parallel in the deer population to the behaviour of jackdaws as observed by that contributor to the Today programme.