Articulation

Sing "do, re, mi, fa" running each syllable into the next, without a breath between them. Now sing it again, cutting each syllable short, like drops. The notes are the same, the written durations too, and the result is different music. That difference is articulation: the more or less joined or detached way notes follow one another (Lacerda 1966, ch. XIV).

Blatter defines it by the start and end of each sound: to articulate is to modify the attack, the release, or both. On a string instrument that comes from the bow; on the piano, from the fingers; on a wind instrument, from the tongue and the breath (Blatter 2007, part 1, art. 6).

Lacerda gathers the main articulations into four: legato, non legato, staccato and portato.

Legato: joined

In legato, notes follow one another joined, with no gap between them, each with its full value. The sign is a curved line over or under the notes, the slur (Lacerda 1966, ch. XIV).

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The same curve between equal notes adds their durations, as the topic on ties showed. Blatter spells out the difference: a tie always joins notes of the same pitch; a slur almost always joins different pitches (Blatter 2007, part 1, art. 6). The word legato can stand in for the curve.

Non legato: not joined

In non legato, notes follow one another separated, but without becoming short; each keeps its value. It has no sign of its own: the words non legato are written over the passage (Lacerda 1966, ch. XIV).

Staccato: detached

In staccato, each note is short and set apart from the next. The sign is a dot over or under the notehead, the same "shortening dot" that Lacerda set aside for this chapter when he dealt with the dot that lengthens (Lacerda 1966, ch. XIV).

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Med gives a proportion: a staccato note sounds for half its value, and the other half is silence. A staccato quarter sounds like an eighth followed by an eighth rest (Med 1996, ch. VII). Med himself warns that the sum is approximate: in practice, how much a note shortens depends on the style, the tempo and the performer. Rests never take the dot.

There is a drier staccato, the staccatissimo, marked with a small wedge. By Med's reckoning the note sounds only a quarter of its value (Med 1996, ch. VII). Lacerda calls this "rough" staccato martellato and marks it with short vertical strokes.

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Portato: between the two

Portato sits halfway between legato and staccato: the notes separate, but only a little. There are two ways to write it. Lacerda's joins both signs, the staccato dots under the legato curve, and he says the notes lose a quarter of their value (Lacerda 1966, ch. XIV).

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Med records that spelling and another, a dot with a dash over each note, with the same proportion: three quarters of sound and a quarter of silence (Med 1996, ch. VII).

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Tenuto: held

Tenuto is a short horizontal line over the note, or the abbreviation ten., and asks for the note to be sustained to the end of its value. Lacerda gives two uses: drawing attention to a note that is not staccato in the middle of a run of staccato notes, and reminding the player that a long note must sound in full, a common mistake with whole and half notes (Lacerda 1966, ch. XIV).

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Med adds that tenuto usually gives the note a slight stress (Med 1996, ch. XXXIII). And Lacerda insists on a warning: tenuto does not lengthen a note beyond its written value. That is the fermata's job.

Accents

An accent makes a note stand out from its neighbours, with more force at the start of the sound. Med describes two main signs (Med 1996, ch. XXXIII):

• the accent (>): the note is stressed and quickly fades;
• the marcato (^): the note is attacked with great vigour and quickly fades, a bigger stress than the plain accent.

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Med also notes that every accent is proportional to the dynamic of the passage: an accent in a soft passage is smaller than an accent in a loud one.

The curve that does everything

The curved line is one of the most overworked signs in the score, and Lacerda goes as far as listing its jobs to avoid confusion: adding durations as a tie, joining the notes sung to one syllable, embracing tuplets, indicating legato, marking phrases and, on bowed instruments, how many notes go in one stroke of the bow (Lacerda 1966, ch. XIV). The context decides which one it is.

Med also keeps apart two things that often travel together. Articulation, the way sounds are attacked and joined, belongs to instrumental technique. Phrasing, the art of shaping phrases, belongs to aesthetics (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII).

What comes next

Accents already brush against another property of sound: intensity. How loud or soft a whole passage sounds, and how it grows or fades, is the subject of dynamics, which also brings the signs of reinforcement, such as sforzato.