sordino
/sɔːˈdiːnəʊ
/noun (plural sordini /sɔːˈdiːni/) Music
1A mute for a musical instrument.Musicians played in a park, using cardboard boxes as sordinos and adapting their music to sounds in the surroundings....
- An adagio for the symphony - earth, worms and misery, fortissimo and sordinos [mutes], lots of sordinos.
- A friend and I decided to make a ‘sword fight’ using trumpet mutes, which are also known as sordinos or sords for short.
1.1 (sordini) (On a piano) the dampers.Take a very famous example: before the first movement of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’, Beethoven very distinctly writes ‘senza sordino’, a clear indication that on today's piano very little pedal should be used.
Origin
Late 16th century: from Italian, from sordo 'mute', from Latin surdus.