As a classically trained singer now thankfully in recovery, I have stacks of traditional bel canto repertoire gathering dust in my study. A typical feature of bel canto singing is the cadenza, two to quite a few bars of showing off toward the end of the song. It’s marked in the music as a big black bar through the stave, and it means that it’s time for the accompanist(s) to down tools and let the singer go nuts.

When you learn to sing this stuff, a substantial part of the training is memorizing the traditional licks and riffs that make up a good cadenza. Then you start playing with them to build apparently improvised (but not really) passages of fireworks to fancy up each song so the audience will yell for more.

That form and method of ornament had to come from somewhere, and my money’s on a vernacular “fioretura” that survives today in the trills and melismas of seán nos.