What are the small ">" signs above the notes?

Question

Take a look:

What are the > markings above the notes? I know of a decrescendo and a crescendo but can they be applied to specific notes?

Answer 1

Simply called an accent. Indicates that note gets played louder (accentuated) than the surrounding notes. How much louder is open to interpretation. An accent can be applied to any note value, and probably works better on an instrument which can sustain that note for its full value, although if a 'suddenly loud' note is needed, it would most likely not have an accent but a sforzando (sf or sfz). The first note in a bar is often accented slightly anyway, so here on the first note, it means give it even more volume.

Answer 2

What an accent denotes is actually that the notes' attack should be particularly emphasized. Loudness is already indicated by the f, it wouldn't make sense to simply say “every note should be played louder”, as Tchaikovsky seems to do here. What he wants is that despite the slow tempo, the notes should not become “rubbery”, but with a clear, present initial impulse. Instead of continuing to write out accents, he then expresses the same with the sempre marcato (at least that's how I understand it).

Note the contrast with the third iteration of the theme, which is even louder but puts ties over everything, emphasising how the fat, pulsating feel is replaced by soaring, ethereal sound:

Answer 3

As is the case with most aspects of music notation, there is no exact definition. This is an 'accent' as people have already explained, and it has to do with loudness and attack quality. The exact meaning depends on context. One general rule of thumb that I learned is that an accented note is one dynamic marking higher than the notated dynamic---e.g. if you are playing piano, the accented notes are mezzo-piano.

But this is just the beginning. For example, if you are playing a piano instrument, this basically applies. But what if you are playing the violin? Usually in context of string music, accents apply to the attack of a note (stronger articulation). In a piano, there is no way to control articulation and volume separately (slurring and pedalling aside). The velocity with which the key goes down controls both the attack and volume. In a sustained instrument (voice, strings, winds, brass, etc.), there is no such direct coupling of these parameters.

It also depends on the composer. Schubert sprinkles these marks around like salt on french fries. Their meaning (which is totally subjective because Schubert is long gone and to my knowledge there is no extant document that gives his reason for using them so often) is somewhat different than in Beethoven---who also uses the 'v' (or 'wedge accent'), 'sfz' (sforzando), and 'rfz' (rinforzando), which are all types of accents that have to do with attack and dynamic.

People have written volumes about these issues, but at the end of the day you just have to have experience and musicianship to make sense of it all.

Claims that always hold are that different types of accented notes should be differentiable form eachother and from non-accented notes, and they should be stronger than non-accented notes.