Ritornello

A ritornello [ritorˈnɛllo] (Italian; "little return") is a recurring passage in Baroque music for orchestra or chorus.

The earliest use of the term "ritornello" in music referred to the final lines of a fourteenth-century madrigal, which were usually in a rhyme scheme and meter that contrasted with the rest of the song. Scholars suggest that the word "ritornello" comes either from the Italian word ritorno (meaning return), or from tornado (meaning turnaround or flourish).

The ritornello as a recurring tutti passage can be traced back to the music of sixteenth-century Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrielli. According to Richard Taruskin, these repeating passages are "endemic to the concertato style" which Gabrielli is credited with developing.

The idea of an orchestral ritornello played an important role in the structure of opera in the eighteenth century. The most common form for an aria during the Baroque period was da capo form, which essentially consisted of an A section followed by a contrasting B section, which was in turn followed by a return of the A section. Many da capo arias could be subdivided further, with ritornello sections framing each of the singer's solo sections, forming the scheme R–A–R–B–R–A–R.

The ritornello was also crucial in the development of the Italian instrumental concerto during the Baroque period. Giuseppe Torelli wrote many violin concertos in which the fast movements used a recurring ritornello in between two extended solo passages of entirely new material. This form was standardized by Antonio Vivaldi, who wrote hundreds of concertos using a modification of Torelli's scheme. Vivaldi's ritornello form established a set of conventions followed by later composers in the eighteenth century:

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