Word.ws English Dictionary

cantu a tenore

cantu a tenore noun: a style of a capella vocal music native to Sardinia featuring a quartet of men singing a four-part harmony, and is characteristic for its use of throat singing.

cantu a tenore: a style of a capella vocal music native to Sardinia featuring a quartet of men singing a four-part...
Image: Sardegnabella, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

cantu a tenore (uncountable)

  1. A style of a capella vocal music native to Sardinia featuring a quartet of men singing a four-part harmony, and is characteristic for its use of throat singing.
    • Cantu a tenore (Canto a tenore in Italian) is a type of localized, multipart singing based on chords that is found in areas of the island of Sardinia (Macchiarella 2008).[…]The Sardinian term cantu a tenore describes the local variants practised in some 80 villages of the centre-north of the...2017 October 5, David Horn, John Shepherd, Paolo Prato, Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, volume 11, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 741
    • If ever music could encapsulate the spirit of Sardinia’s rugged mountains and pastoral landscapes, it is canto a tenore. It is performed by a four-part male choir, the tenores, made up of sa oghe (the soloist and lead voice), su bassu (bass), sa contra (contralto) and sa mesu oghe...2022 July 7, Alexis Averbuck, Duncan Garwood, Gregor Clark, Lonely Planet Sardinia, Lonely Planet, →ISBN, page 418

Forms of cantu a tenore

alternative formcanto a tenore
alternative formcantu a tenòre

Origin of cantu a tenore

Borrowed from Sardinian cantu a tenòre (literally “singing a tenore”).

Questions about cantu a tenore

What does cantu a tenore mean?
Cantu a tenore means a style of a capella vocal music native to Sardinia featuring a quartet of men singing a four-part harmony, and is characteristic for its use of throat singing.
What part of speech is cantu a tenore?
Cantu a tenore is a noun.

Words near cantu a tenore in the dictionary

  1. cantrips
  2. cantrix
  3. cants
  4. cantt.
  5. Cantu
  6. cantu a tenore
  7. Cantua Creek
  8. Cantuarian
  9. Cantuarians
  10. cantus
  11. cantus firmi

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cantu a tenore (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cantu a tenore.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cantu_a_tenore. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.