A toccata is a piece of music written to show what the player's fingers can do. It is usually for an instrument with a keyboard — organ, harpsichord, or piano — and it is full of fast runs, big chords, and busy passages that don't settle into a simple tune you could hum. The point is display: listen to how quickly and cleanly this can be played. The name comes from Italian toccare, 'to touch', because the player touches the keys — which is a nice contrast with a sonata, from 'to sound', or a cantata, from 'to sing'. Toccatas often come paired with a fugue, and the most famous piece in the whole family is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the dramatic organ music everyone knows from horror films. The plural in English is toccatas, though musicians who like Italian sometimes write toccate. This is a specialist word — you meet it on a concert programme or in a music class, not in daily conversation.