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Music vocabulary · Performance and Practice

Arco

Meaning in music, with examples

adverbAdvanced term

In music, arco means: A direction for string players telling them to use the bow again after playing pizzicato or another non-bowed technique.

In Turkish: yay ile

How it is used

It appears in string parts, especially after pizzicato passages. Players switch back to normal bowed playing when they see arco in the score.

Example sentences

  1. After eight bars of pizzicato, the cellists returned to arco so the line would blend with the sustained violas.

    Here arco tells the cellists to stop plucking and resume bowing, which creates a smoother, more sustained orchestral sound.

  2. The editor added arco above the entrance because several students kept plucking through the next phrase in rehearsal.

    In this example, arco serves as a practical reminder in the part, preventing players from continuing pizzicato by mistake.

Common collocations

  • arco passage
  • play arco
  • return to arco
  • stringsThe section of instruments played with a bow, mainly violins, violas, cellos and double basses. It also means the actual strings on an instrument such as a guitar.
  • instrumentAn object made or used to produce musical sounds, such as a piano, violin, guitar, drum or ney.

More terms: Performance and Practice

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