upbeat
About 10 minutes after the opening downbeat, the auditorium was plunged into darkness, bringing the music to an abrupt halt.
They were waiting for the conductor's baton to give the downbeat to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.
His symphonic work demands a thoughtful placement of downbeats.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Beats or lengths of musical notes
backbeat
bar
bar line
breakbeat
common time
eighth
hemidemisemiquaver
major seventh
major sixth
major third
metre
min.
ninth
perfect fourth
quadruple
quarter note
quaver
quintuple
semibreve
semiquaver

downbeat | Business English

downbeat
adjective
 informal/ˈdaʊnbiːt/ukus
quiet and without much excitement:
The actual signing of the contract was a downbeat affair without any ceremony.
without much hope for the future:
Despite the surging share price, analysts were downbeat about the company's prospects.

Examples of downbeat

downbeat
The sharp tutti attack is now the direct result of a turntable scratch, and it marks the syncopated downbeats of chopped and sampled breaks.
Its title, too, is unfashionably downbeat, promising no fabulous journey to the centre of the mind, no explanation of consciousness, no epiphany.
The last of these reflected the downbeat, darkly realistic nature of the writing.
On examination, typically in addition to downbeat nystagmus, lower cranial nerve palsies and both gait and limb ataxia are noted.
This is an attractive pattern because it provides four accents over two measures, and all except the initial downbeat are syncopated.
But this can also result from a tendency to overemphasize downbeats so that momentum ebbs.
For those who value planning, the general tenor is downbeat.
The repetition of the harmonics in measure 2 helps us to hear a downbeat despite the tied note in the bass.
The process is slowly progressive and invariably there are associated oculomotor findings (particularly spontaneous downbeat nystagmus).
This syllable must be recited on the upbeat following the sixth downbeat (metrical position as tactus).
The pulse is maintained throughout the held notes while the band's entry on a strong downbeat satisfies, perhaps, any lingering sense of metric ambiguity.
All of the instrumental layers emphasise the downbeat, even the snare drum.
However, the failure to resolve the seventh from the previous measure and the open fifth on the downbeat of measure 26 seem quite uncharacteristic.
It doesn't have to sound melodramatic and minor, and you don't even have to put it on the downbeat.
Here, the riff begins as an anacrusis to a suppressed (deliberately unaccented) downbeat.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.