12 days of musical terminology, day 7 - melisma

Very brief post today, because it's New Year's Eve and I need to devote myself to distractions (I get very fed up on New Year's Eve if I allow myself to think about it!)

Melisma is very easy to explain (hence choosing it for today), and it's used constantly in choir rehearsals - so much so that most people must know what it means, but I always wonder whether there might be a few people who don't, and don't dare ask. So this is for those people.

In its simplest (and most commonly used) sense, it just means that a particular syllable has more than one note sung to it. For example, the start of "Where is love?" from Oliver - there are five notes on the word "where", so that's a melisma. The Wikipedia article has a much more thorough explanation (and a Messiah example, which is good because it saves me having to write one out).