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The incipit ( ) of a text is the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label. In a musical composition, an incipit is an initial sequence of Musical note, having the same purpose. The word incipit comes from Latin and means "it begins". Its counterpart taken from the ending of the text is the explicit.
Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to by their incipits, as with for example Agnus Dei. During the medieval period in Europe, incipits were often written in a different Typeface or colour from the rest of the work of which they were a part, and "incipit pages" might be heavily decorated with illumination. Though the word incipit is Latin, the practice of the incipit predates classical antiquity by several millennia and can be found in various parts of the world. Although not always called by the name of incipit today, the practice of referring to texts by their initial words remains commonplace.
The catalog was meant to be used by the very limited number of official who had access to the archives, and the width of a clay tablet and its resolution did not permit long entries. An example from Lerner (1998):Lerner, Frederick Andrew. The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age. New York: Continuum, 1998. . .
All the names of Parshiyot are incipits, the title coming from a word, occasionally two words, in its first two verses. Each book is, of course, called by the same name as the first Parashah within it.
Some of the Psalms are known by their incipits, most noticeably Psalm 51 (Septuagint numbering: Psalm 50), which is known in Western Christianity by its Latin incipit Miserere ("Have mercy").
In the Talmud, the chapters of the Gemara are titled in print and known by their first words, e.g. the first chapter of Mishnah Berachot ("Benedictions") is called Me-ematai ("From when"). This word is printed at the head of every subsequent page within that chapter of the tractate.
In Rabbinic Judaism usage, the incipit is known as the "dibur ha-matḥil" (דיבור המתחיל), or "beginning phrase", and refers to a section heading in a published monograph or commentary that typically, but not always, quotes or paraphrases a classic biblical or rabbinic passage to be commented upon or discussed.
Many religious songs and prayers are known by their opening words.
Sometimes an entire monograph is known by its "dibur hamatḥil". The published mystical and exegesis discourses of the Chabad-Lubavitch rebbes (called "ma'amarim"), derive their titles almost exclusively from the "dibur ha-matḥil" of the individual work's first chapter.
The modern use of standardized titles, combined with the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD), have made the incipit obsolete as a tool for organizing information in libraries.
However, incipits are still used to refer to untitled poems, songs, and prayers, such as , arias, many prayers and hymns, and numerous poems, including those of Emily Dickinson. That such a use is an incipit and not a title is most obvious when the line breaks off in the middle of a grammatical unit (e.g., Shakespeare's sonnet 55 "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments").
Law Latin legal concepts are often designated by the first few words, for example, habeas corpus for habeas corpus ad subjiciendum ("may you have the person to be subjected to") which are itself the key words of a much longer writ.
Many propose the first few words of a document as a default file name, assuming that the incipit may correspond to the intended title of the document.
The space-filling, or place-holding, text lorem ipsum is known as such from its incipit.
Occasionally, incipits have been used for humorous effect, such as in the Alan Plater-written television series The Beiderbecke Affair and its sequels, in which each episode is named for the first words spoken in the episode (leading to episode titles such as "What I don't understand is this..." and "Um...I know what you're thinking").
\new Staff {
\tempo "Larghetto" 4 = 116
\clef treble \time 6/4 \key bes \minor
\partial 2.
\relative a'' {
bes8 \p ( c_\markup { \italic "espress." } des a bes ges ) f4-. \< ( f-. f-. ) f \! ( ges8 \> f es c ) \! des2 ^\> ( bes4 ) \!
}
}
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| Incipit for Chopin's Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1, single-staff version |
\new PianoStaff <<
\new Staff {
\tempo "Larghetto" 4 = 116
\clef treble \time 6/4 \key bes \minor
\partial 2.
\relative a'' {
bes8 \p ( c_\markup { \italic "espress." } des a bes ges ) f4-. \< ( f-. f-. ) f \! ( ges8 \> f es c ) \! des2 ^\> ( bes4 ) \!
}
}
\new Staff {
\clef bass \time 6/4 \key bes \minor
r r r
bes,8 \sustainOn ( f des' bes f' f ) \sustainOff
bes,8 \sustainOn ( f es' a f' f ) \sustainOff
bes,8 ( f des' bes f' f )
}
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| Incipit for Chopin's Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1, full-score version |
Musical incipits are printed in standard music notation. They typically feature the first few bars of a piece, often with the most prominent musical material written on a single staff (the examples given at right show both the single-staff and full-score incipit variants). Incipits are especially useful in music because they can call to mind the reader's own musical memory of the work where a printed title would fail to do so. Musical incipits appear both in catalogs of music and in the tables of contents of volumes that include multiple works.
In choral music, sacred or secular pieces from before the 20th century were often titled with the incipit text. For instance, the proper of the Catholic Church Mass and the Latin transcriptions of the biblical psalms used as prayers during services are always titled with the first word or words of the text. Protestant hymns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are also traditionally titled with an incipit.
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