Mordents & Pralltrillers

Editors’ Note: In reply to a letter from Sol Babitz in the November 5 issue of the NYR—in which, owing to an editorial slip, the word “mordent” was misspelled—Stanley Kauffmann writes:

I cannot quarrel with Mr. Babitz’s expertise; I can only cite my occasions of sin. A New Dictionary of Music by Arthur Jacobs says: “These two [ornaments] are sometimes called respectively inverted mordent and just mordent; and in German Mordent means only the second, the first being called Pralltriller.” The American College Dictionary defines a pralltriller as “an inverted mordent.”