# Cantabile (Italian, "singable")

Source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/cantabile

**Cantabile is an instruction to play in a singing style, shaped, connected, and phrased as a voice would phrase it rather than as a sequence of notes.**

The practical test is whether you could sing the line in one breath. If not, the phrase is probably being played too slowly, or the breaths are in the wrong places. Singing a passage before playing it is the fastest way to find its shape, and string teachers ask for it constantly for exactly this reason.

For the bow it means concealing the changes: a phrase interrupted by an audible bow change has stopped singing. For the left hand it means continuous vibrato and connected shifts, so the line has no holes in it.

Espressivo asks for expression more generally, dolce for sweetness, and molto cantabile for the singing quality intensified. They overlap, and none of them is decoration, they are instructions about the shape of the line.

Canonical source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/cantabile