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Re: Articulation

Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-11-29 13:53

This is a later version of something that I posted several years ago to the Klarinet list.

SOME METAPHORS FOR ARTICULATION

The purpose of this little essay is to suggest that it may be useful to change how we think about staccato on the clarinet.

A common viewpoint is to think of a staccato passage as being made up of staccato notes -- so that the action of producing a staccato note, repeated, creates a staccato passage. Here we take the opposite viewpoint; namely, we take the staccato passage to be the fundamental structure, thinking of it as an interrupted legato. An isolated staccato note is then dealt with at the end, as a special case.

Notice that it is not claimed that this is in any sense the truth. It is simply a different metaphor. However, it leads us on naturally to consider other, subsidiary metaphors that differ from the ones that would be entailed by the 'isolated note' metaphor. Some of these subsidiary metaphors I have found useful myself.

WHY METAPHORS?
Playing the clarinet is experienced by an expert performer as a whole, natural vehicle of their musical expression -- rather as they experience their normal voice as a natural vehicle of their everyday expression. It is almost impossible to teach this whole to another directly. We have to divide it up into various components -- firstly, into the categories physical, intellectual and emotional; and then into further subskills. In addition, any way in which we describe it has to be incomplete.

However, so as not to get stuck in this division, it is important from time to time to emphasise the wholeness. Some people seem to be lucky enough, or well-taught enough, to continue to bear both aspects in mind -- or better, to embody both aspects -- in an expressive integration as they develop. But most people get sidetracked from time to time.

The problem is that when we begin learning a skill, we make mistakes. If those mistakes go uncorrected, and get built in, we may create another whole, with results different from the ones we were aiming at. It may then be difficult to take this counterproductive 'whole' apart and find out where we might change things in order to get better. (It may even be the case that we have several things wrong, so getting just one of them right won't make enough difference even to show us we are on the right track.)

Wise teachers, or wise students, will try a number of different ways of approaching the problem of a badly-put-together bit of skill. Direct instruction, or the following of direct instruction, is the most common strategy; but I want to suggest here something else. It is to take advantage of the student's experience of other features of how the world works.

How we do this is to ask the student -- or ourselves if we are the ones in difficulty -- to imagine the experience of playing as though it is like the experience of something else. That 'something else' is carefully chosen to capture either an important feature of what has to happen physically, or an important feature of what a more expert player knows the experience is like for him or her when it is successful.

If we are in difficulty, it may be that we are already imagining the experience in terms of a wrong 'something else', which holds us in a grip that we must break. Indeed, we may even be reinforcing this grip by the way in which we talk about the situation.

'TONGUING'
In clarinet playing, the verb "to tongue" is an example of such a difficulty. This is because in common usage it is often applied to a single note (as in, "that note is tongued"), and it may easily carry the implication that it is something that we must do to the reed, with our tongue, in order to begin the note.

I've even played for a famous conductor who asks a player to "tongue that note harder" when they want a stronger attack. This way of speaking gives an even stronger impression that it is the action of the tongue that begins the note, and suggests further that the harder we tongue, the louder will be the beginning. But in fact, the tongue begins the note only in the same sense that the light-switch lights the room. We don't get more light if we push it harder!

The problem doesn't occur to the same degree in some other languages. In Italian, the word used is 'staccato', which means quite simply, 'separated', and which is more suggestive of the idea that the action of the tongue will interrupt a note, or the passage between two legato notes, just as the light switch interrupts the circuit that produces the light.

A more appropriate and helpful English word is the word 'articulation', because 'articulation' is suggestive both of separation and of joining. We speak of the elbow as an 'articulated' joint, and use the phrase 'articulated lorry'; it is clear that both arm and lorry are each one thing that can be regarded for certain purposes as two joined things.

I would say that the fundamental difficulty of staccato is that of attaining physical mastery of the various aspects of this separation/joining; and that therefore we do best to begin with by considering a sequence of notes rather than one isolated note.

Here is a collection of some metaphors I have found useful myself. As promised, each one of them tries to communicate either an aspect of the real world situation, or an aspect of this experience of successful articulation -- which I maintain is almost always an experience of unity in separation. The metaphors do this in a variety of ways, via language, mental images and physical sensations.

METAPHOR 1 -- 'MUD'
If we imagine a series of notes that we want to be staccato, or articulated, we may think of them as represented in the diagram.

(The diagram is a series of shaded rectangles, representing the notes which appear above them, separated by silences. Under each silence is the letter 'd', and under each rectangle is the letter 'u'.)

This is a very schematic representation. The idea is that the shaded rectangles represent the sound of the semiquavers above them. The letters underneath are the usual vocalisations, with the letter d occurring where the tongue is on the reed and the letter u where it comes off, allowing the reed to vibrate.

It is a sort of graph of sound intensity against time, although in reality such a graph would not have sharp corners, or even be rectangular. The reed takes a moment to begin vibrating, and the air inside the clarinet continues to vibrate for a moment when the reed stops, so the result would be much less mechanical. Even so, it is a preliminary picture we might make of a crisply articulated short burst of staccato.

In the conventional vocal representation of staccato, we are often asked to say the syllables du-du-du-du-du etc. This again has the effect that we are likely to imagine the d initiating each note.

Looking at the middle of the passage, though, there is no particular reason to group the d and the u in this way. We can just as well say the syllables ud-ud-ud-ud-ud, or, as I would suggest, creating a real English word, mud-ud-ud-ud-ud etc. We can imagine ourselves continually interrupting the word 'mud'.

The advantage of this move is twofold. Firstly it has the effect of emphasising the unity of the passage -- there is just one word 'mud' to be interrupted. Secondly, it makes clear that each individual note begins with a pure sound, one that is created by the air pressure. There is no percussive 'clonk' made by the tongue. Rather than imagining that we start a note with the tongue, we imagine that we 'stop stopping' the previous one.

Now, the question immediately arises: how much force does it require to stop a note? Taking this question as a sort of research project, we can begin to experience the process of articulation from a diametrically opposed viewpoint to that suggested by the word "tonguing". (You've got to do it with the clarinet, though -- thinking about it isn't enough.)

First you must be sure that you really are producing a good firm sound before proceeding. Then, if you play a low E, say, it is possible to place the tongue gently on the reed without stopping the sound. The pitch of the note becomes flatter, but the reed is able to continue to vibrate even though it has a 'passenger' to carry.

It's absolutely necessary to continue blowing strongly throughout the process. Some people find this difficult to do, because their tongue action is already bound up with their blowing. For them, breaking this connection is perhaps the most powerful move they can make to improve their playing, quite apart from their staccato. In fact, with a little practice, by changing the embouchure and tongue position and increasing the air pressure, we can in this way play quite a strong note at the pitch almost of an E flat.

Speaking technically, the reed is able to vibrate, despite extra damping, but the vibration has to carry an added mass. The elementary theory of oscillations then tells us that the result will be a lower frequency of vibration -- hence, a lower note.

So, in order to stop a low note, we need quite a firm tongue action. Think of the staccato chalumeau clarinet solo in the slow movement of Stravinsky's 'Dumbarton Oaks' concerto.

By contrast, and quite strikingly, in the upper register it is almost impossible to touch the reed centrally at the tip without stopping the note. Even a very light contact interrupts the reed's vibration. This can come as a great surprise to many players. Those of us who have had the misfortune to get a small particle of biscuit or other material between the reed and the mouthpiece whilst playing will find it, on reflection, less strange. (You can almost tell which are the reed players among other orchestral musicians by the fact that they always finish their coffee break with several mouthfuls of coffee ˜ or even skip the biscuit entirely.)

Anyhow, we immediately become aware of a possible difference in the action of the tongue, depending on the register of the passage. Notice that this discovery is the result of an experiment that we could not have thought of making had we not been open to the idea that the job of the tongue in "tonguing" may be to stop rather than to start a note.

It also becomes clear that in articulating a passage we must never blow less. In fact, if we don't blow strongly enough, so that there is insufficient pressure difference between the inside of the mouth and the inside of the mouthpiece, the reed is unlikely to start to vibrate again in a smooth and well-behaved way (particularly in the high register) when we 'stop stopping' it.

METAPHOR 2 -- A PENDULUM
One way to think about the situation involves another metaphor. The idea is to imagine that the reed behaves like a pendulum of greater or lesser length, according to whether it is vibrating to produce a low note or a high note. This mini-pendulum comes to an abrupt halt if we stop blowing. Real pendulums oscillate much more slowly, and also gradually come to a standstill, unless their oscillation is maintained by an applied force. In a clock, this force is supplied either by a spring or by an electromagnetic system.

The vibration of the reed is similarly maintained, in this case by the pressure difference between the air in the mouth and the air inside the instrument.

We can imagine, then, that a high note, looked at in slow motion, is like a fast-swinging, light and delicate pendulum, and a low note like a long, slow-swinging and massive one.

Now imagine stopping each of these pendulums, just as we imagined stopping the reed with the tongue. We would clearly need a stronger grip to stop the long and massive pendulum. We might only use two fingers for the small one. Also, if we needed to release a pendulum afterwards so that it went on swinging nicely as before, we would be careful about precisely how we gripped it in stopping it. Probably we would hold the small one particularly carefully, so that it would begin again by slipping between our two fingers as we opened them slightly.

All of these considerations have their analogues in how we touch the reed with the tongue. The simplest and most delicate action that succeeds in stopping the reed is likely to be the most effective in allowing it to start when we let it go again. This is why we are often recommended to touch the reed at the tip. But if we try to give more specific details of how the tongue should touch the reed, we begin to be in trouble. Because players have very different physiques, including differing lengths and shapes of tongue, what works well for one player may be useless for another, We have to be flexible in our approach. Every player has the opportunity to find out personally what works best; though there is more than one way of going about this, too, and not every method has an equal chance of success.

CONTROLLING THE TONGUE
You can try out how much control you have over your tongue by sticking it out at yourself in a mirror, and telling it to keep still.

If you can do this at all, it will be with some difficulty. It seems that the tongue can perform miraculous feats, but resists direct, precise instruction. Children beginning to talk learn to perform incredibly subtle movements of the tongue, though they have no sense of directing their own physical actions. They can even talk and eat at the same time.

So if you are trying to instruct yourself or others in related skills, such as articulation, a delicate approach is in order. It has rightly been said that if it were possible for us to teach children to speak directly, by telling them exactly how to do it, they would probably never learn.

Of course, it is impossible for us to interfere, because children can already deal with much of the mechanics of speaking by the time they can understand any such instruction. It's a sobering thought, though, that if we could in some way offer direct instruction, we would not only rush in to do it, but also probably have competing systems, and experts, and lots of reasons why it wasn't working.

As children, we learn skills like speaking or singing by imitation, approximating more and more closely the sounds around us. As adults, we have the tendency to introduce an intermediate stage in this process: we try to find out and then describe to ourselves what we should do to achieve the required result, and then concentrate on doing that thing. We try, in other words, to tell ourselves how to do it.

Sometimes this may be a sensible move, particularly if the time-scale we are dealing with is long, as when we are planning a picnic; but it is wise to moderate the process by trusting ourselves to learn even without knowing how. This is particularly true when the complication of what we have to do is such that we cannot keep track of our actions. In this way we are also less likely to make the mistake of being so interested in the intermediate stage that we lose sight of what we were trying to do in the first place.

Several interesting and useful books have been written about the possibilities of this approach, mostly as applied to sports. (A famous violin player is quoted as saying that 'The Inner Game of Tennis' by Timothy Gallwey is the best book about playing the violin he knows.) Essentially, the idea is to have a good model or notion of what you want to achieve, and then perform the action whilst remaining as conscious or aware as possible of one aspect of your experience, always in a non-judgemental way.

This particular aspect might be a body sensation or behaviour, or alternatively part of the actual result obtained. After a while, it becomes possible to make an intelligent choice of what to concentrate on at any given moment. Progress is often much more fluent and natural than with a more traditional method of immediate error-correction. What happens is that we tie up our conscious mind with the job of describing something useful for us to know in some sense, with the added advantage that our intellect is disabled from delivering its customary evaluations, instructions and fears, most of which would be too late to be effective even if they were appropriate.

In many ways, these activities of our mind are our greatest enemy, and constitute the opponent in Gallwey's metaphor of the 'inner game'. They also give rise to the vicious circle of the psychological block, as we shall see, where the anxiety arising from our fear of failure is the fuel of that very fear.

It's easy to approach staccato on the clarinet with too rigid an attitude to controlling the tongue. In finding how the tongue can most effectively stop the reed from vibrating, and move neatly away in order to allow it to continue, we do best by indulging freely in experiment.

When we already have a problem, our experience of playing the instrument tend to fix many of the variables we may want to alter, immediately we put the instrument in our mouth. This makes experiment difficult, because though we may feel uncomfortable about the defects in our playing we already know about, we feel even more uncomfortable about ones that we are generating and observing for the first time.

The metaphors I have already described constitute a minimally confronting context for such experiment. Fundamentally, they move our actions in the direction of using much less force, particularly in the higher register, and encourage us to think of the action of the tongue more like that of a switch than that of an impulse. Here is a further metaphor that may help.

METAPHOR 3 -- PICKUP AND TURNTABLE
Imagine we have a hi-fi gramophone with a powerful amplifier and speaker at our disposal. We have also a recording that includes a loud sustained passage, and our job is to produce a loud, clear, short sound (i.e. a staccato chord) from the equipment. How would we go about it?

If we turn up the volume control, we can lower the stylus of the pickup arm until it is just above the part of the rotating record that contains the loud passage. At this point we can delicately lower the stylus on to the record for an instant, thereby producing the loud, abrupt chord.

But notice that there is nothing in our action that corresponds to the abruptness or the energy of the result. The powerful component of the system is the amplifier, which is operating constantly at the same level. In fact, if we were to match the intended loudness with a similarly violent action with the pickup arm, we would most likely fail to achieve our objective.

The same situation obtains when we play a loud short note on the clarinet. The power comes from the air-stream, which is what causes the note to begin as the tongue stops stopping it.

Compare the situation when we enunciate a very loud syllable, beginning and ending with a 'd'. Here it really does seem that the tongue is working hard, especially just before and just afterwards. But this is because the tongue has to hold back the airstream, which indeed must be forceful. Admittedly it does also seem that a violent action of the tongue is being performed when we hear a fortissimo staccato note on the clarinet. But as we have seen from our experiment, it takes very little contact with the tongue to stop the reed, even when it is vibrating strongly.

The helpful analogy for the action of the tongue is the analogy with a control system, rather than a power system. Remember the light switch! You can play a very loud short note with a very delicate and precise tongue action, just as, in principle, you could turn on and off even an atomic power station with your little finger.

This last analogy might seem ridiculously extreme. But in the world of our imagination, it may be really useful. Many players are very surprised to discover quite how much they habitually overestimate the amount of tongue action required. We really need practically no contact between tongue and reed in the high register. The area of contact can be reduced almost to nothing and the effect still achieved, even in fortissimo. Nor is it necessary to specify exactly how the tongue moves.

I personally find that in the higher register I tend to touch the reed with the underside of the tip of my tongue, which seems to alter shape rather than move bodily, especially in fast passages, whilst lower down the action is larger. (A student once said to me, "But, my teacher says that's *wrong*!") Also the degree of tension in the tongue can vary. Perhaps those with a very fast staccato have succeeded in controlling the sort of oscillations that we sometimes get in flexed groups of muscles, though in general, in my experience, less rather than more tension is to be encouraged.

We are really lucky to have this flexibility of control with the reed. We can play a staccato that is more rapid than the speed at which we could fully interrupt the word "mud" in reasonably loud speech. To do so, we must be able to touch the reed without interrupting the airstream or compromising the embouchure, which is another reason why experimenting with stopping the note whilst still blowing is so important. Sometimes players with long tongues find this difficult, but they have all learned to talk acceptably, which required some gymnastic lingual ability. Playing staccato on the clarinet is a minor feat by comparison.

Some players have a phenomenally fast, "rattlesnake" staccato, and it is probably hoping too much to think of developing such a special ability from scratch; but a good medium-fast tongue action, fast enough for the classical repertoire, and above all variable in its weight and area of contact, should be accessible to most if not all players.

METAPHOR 4 -- FAIRY PRINCESSES
An important aspect of a staccato passage is that its constituent notes may be shorter or longer, independent of the speed of the passage. In other words, the proportion of note to silence is variable.

The idea of the 'Fairy Princess' metaphor is that the staccato-cycle:

silence/note/beginning-of-next-silence

...is represented by 24 hours in the life of two fairy princesses.

(They're fairy princesses because, as we know, a fairy princess rests very lightly on her bed. In fact, she's so sensitive that, according to one fairytale, she can feel a dried pea under a dozen matresses.)

In the metaphor, the proportion of time the princess is asleep in bed corresponds to the proportion of time the tongue rests on the reed -- gently, you notice.

One fairy princess gets up late, and goes to bed early, while the other gets up early and goes to bed late. (There can be lots of acting-out for younger students.)

The life of one princess corresponds to short staccato, while the life of the other princess corresponds to lightly interrupted legato.

But the point is that there is no difference in the lightness with which the two princesses rest on the bed. A sequence of abrupt, short staccato notes has just the same tongue action as a 'legato staccato'. This is quite counterintuitive, I think. Short staccato sounds as though it corresponds to violent tongue action.

Sometimes I find that thinking about the distance of my tongue from the reed (second point of view) helps me to slow down and control a staccato that is suddenly moving too fast for the context.

THE SOUND IN STACCATO
Anyone who has tried to emulate Danny Kaye doing his virtuoso tongue-twisting prestissimo "patter" will know from personal experience that one particular sort of voice works better than any other. The sound that gives clarity to his breakneck verbal delivery is quite light and bright ˜ there are lots of consonants, too.

(Danny Kaye, by the way, was a very good musician. We can all learn from his performances conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.)

But why is it that fast, dense passages seem to require this particular timbre to sound at their best?

Before answering this question, we should convince ourselves that we indeed are capable of producing a variety of basic sounds on the clarinet, by varying, among other things, the embouchure and the resonance of the cavity behind the reed, which includes the mouth, the larynx and probably more. When we speak of someone having a good sound, it is not always realised that a really able player uses a number of different sounds, or, more accurately changes the sound from moment to moment, even if we as listeners perceive just one basic quality.

The reason why faster moving music needs a timbre with more higher frequencies in it, in order to sound as clear as slower music for a given acoustic, is this. Lower frequencies persist longer, and muddy the change from one note to the next, if they are predominant in the sound. We know (from listening to late-night parties next door) that bass notes resist absorption more effectively than the higher partials. If these higher partials are present, they die faster, and form a non-overlapping sequence in a fast moving passage. The result is a clarity of movement from one note to the next. This is why we find we need softer reeds, which produce more defined high partials, in a very resonant acoustic.

It's also easier for us to stop a high frequency vibration than a lower one. The effect of articulation is therefore more marked when the sound is more brilliant. Even when we have completely stopped the reed, doubtless the tube vibrates for a moment longer, and the hall for longer than that. Again, the high frequencies dominate the perceived division between one note and its successor, and so it makes sense to keep the sound rich in upper partials.

A large resonating cavity behind the reed makes the sound richer in the medium range harmonics, which doesn't help with this clarity. Therefore it may be better to choose a smaller mouth shape and an embouchure that brightens the sound, as we might naturally do for fast legato semiquavers.

This is just a biasing of the sorts of movements of tongue and embouchure we make when we play any passage. In the end it is probable that any passage, however articulated, requires a whole range of tongue movements or techniques, modulated not consciously but after the manner of speech, which is to say governed by the character of the executant's intention or view of the music.

BEGINNINGS AND PHRASING
Till now, we have looked at articulation as something best thought of not as an action that begins a note, but instead as an action mostly to do with the end of the previous note in a sequence.

But then, how do we deal with the awkward question of how we use the tongue when there are no other notes -- the 'special case' I mentioned at the beginning? In other words, what metaphor do we use when we begin a smooth phrase, or just one note?

Firstly, it's useful to clear aside the idea that there is one 'right' way to do it. If you speak to professional players, you will find a variety of responses on the subject. Some players almost always use the tongue, others sometimes do and sometimes don't, depending on the context. We should have at our disposal metaphors that can embrace all the techniques that successful players use.

It is said: there was a famous magician who specialised in card tricks. He was a renowned technician, but one trick in particular baffled his colleagues. It became an obsession with them to discover his secret. Every time he performed it, they would watch closely, and from time to time one of them was convinced he had solved the riddle. But immediately the master magician would smile, and do the trick again in such a way that it was obvious that the proposed solution was not the answer.

Finally, when he retired, he put his colleagues out of their misery. There was no one trick. He had three or four ways of producing the same illusion, and when anyone thought they had him cornered, he would switch to another method.

There is a moral in this story that has a wider application than the present discussion. When someone is expert at something that we find difficult, we tend to think that their playing contains some 'secret ingredient'. Perhaps it's the make of reeds, or mouthpiece, or the shape of their mouth, or the strength of their embouchure and so on. Students sometimes mob famous players after concerts in search of this sort of information. But like the 'good sound' which is in fact many sounds, the answer is almost always more plural. We may need to enrich our own plurality and flexibility to succeed.

METAPHORS 5 and 6 -- THE BOW AND THE HOSEPIPE
The diagram illustrates, again in schematic form, the beginning of a note, supposed to be begun without the tongue.

(The diagram is a sharply rising curve, starting from nothing, that reaches a maximum after a short time, and remains steady thereafter.)

There are a number of possible shapes, depending on the steepness of the beginning of the curve, and the variety of these shapes is mediated by the details of the muscular opposition abdominal/diaphragm which we usually call support. As I pointed out in "All that stuff about the diaphragm", this process is mostly unconscious, occurs when we have the opposition set up as we begin the note, and allows the result to follow the sort of shape that we have imagined. You can, for example, imagine a shallower or a steeper curve to begin with, and continue the shape after the high point, either maintaining the dynamic or making a gradual diminuendo.

As the opposition is set up, we can imagine a drawn bow, about to shoot an arrow. The abdominal muscles take the role of the bow, whilst the diaphragm corresponds to the hand and arm, which provide the equal and opposite force holding the system in equilibrium. The more the support, the more the bow is drawn and the greater are the forces involved. More support thus means a steeper initial curve in the diagram if the diaphragm is suddenly relaxed, whilst very little support gives a more gentle entry. But this is as though we actually shoot the arrow. Sometimes we will want to maintain control through the initial curve, as though we simply allow the arrow to move forward as the force of the bow overcomes the reduced pull of our arm. If we maintain the support in this way, we can often achieve a very focussed and precise entry, even without the use of the tongue, and control of how the note subseqently develops can give all the varieties of accent, fortepiano and phrase-shaping which are the life-blood especially of slow and expressive music.

The one thing we cannot do in this way is to completely eradicate the initial upward curve.

But we can do so using the tongue. The effect is as though by very delicately stroking the reed at the beginning of the note, we shave off the initial curve, so that the note reaches the peak almost immediately. Remember, the note begins when we imagine it beginning (see, 'All that stuff about the diaphragm'), not when we experience doing something to begin it -- so, here, we imagine it beginning and then simultaneously perform the tongue stroke. The duration of contact of the tongue with the reed is very short, and the touch very gentle (imagine a feather). Even if we want an explosive accent, the holding back of the attack is done by the diaphragm.

The important point is that the action of the tongue can be cosmetic. We can imagine the attack first and then clean it up with the tongue as it begins.

The 'hosepipe' metaphor applies to the situation where it is just the tongue that holds back the attack. We play without support ˜ and then the action of the tongue takes longer, because it must remain on the reed during the build up of air pressure from the abdominal muscles. When the air pressure is at the level we require, we release the reed, which begins to vibrate. The analogy is with a garden hose, controlled at the 'business end' by a valve (or a thumb). The water pressure is constant after the tap connecting the hose to the water supply is turned on.

Personally I usually find this less satisfactory, because I dislike the artificial feeling of the air pushing against a non-vibrating reed for such a long time. Also it is possible to achieve effects of any subtlety as we articulate notes in quiet dynamcs only by using a combination of tongue and diaphragm, or diaphragm alone. Still, using the tongue alone can be useful, though it seems ironic that this less flexible method is the one that is most commonly taught. The 'hosepipe' method is in fact the special case of the 'bow plus cleanup' method in the limiting case where we don't use support.

Finally, on the subject of support in fast staccato passages, we should note that very often sub-phrasing needs to be shown. Playing with support is the ideal way to do this, as then we have a natural control of the dynamic envelope, as we would in legato. Yet there is no interruption of the airstream, so the reed still behaves well.

EXERCISES
It is not my purpose here to provide exercises for staccato, which can be found in many books, methods and tutors. Moreover, exercises divorced from music have the disadvantage that they lead to the habit of regarding articulation as a monochrome technique. I want to hear a staccato that makes it clear to me why it is being used. There is brilliant staccato; and also staccato to make notes light, staccato to make notes heavy, staccato to make audible, bubbly staccato, 'travelling' staccato and many more. I could have said virtuoso staccato instead of brilliant staccato and not been misunderstood, but this is a detestable use of the word 'virtuoso'. True virtuosity consists of the ability to make a piece sound necessary in its own terms, so that the response of the public might well be to say, "What wonderful music!" more than, "What a wonderful player!" Thus staccato should always be studied relative to a musical context.

However, it's worthwhile mentioning one small exercise that is sufficiently effective and innocent to be worth recommendation.

I said before that it's often advantageous to get one's mind out of the way to allow one's body to learn more fluently and naturally (the 'inner game' techniques). If we tie our minds up with another difficulty than the one of articulating, our minds can't interfere.

Now, one of the abilities we sometimes need when we play music is the ability to change between semiquavers and triplets, say, or between straight quavers and quintuplets, whilst the beat itself remains constant. This can be made into an exercise in staccato, using a metronome. We switch at random between groupings of two, three, four, five and even six to a beat, against a constant pulse. The mental difficulty of imagining the shift accurately and adjusting when we prove mistaken I find an excellent context in which to develop basic articulation skills.

© Antony Pay 1993/1997/2006

Post Edited (2021-03-01 19:33)

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