Just as several categories of accentuation were identified as contributing to the intended character of a piece of music, so different types and degrees of articulation were discussed by eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century musicians.
Articulation could be indicated by the composer in the form of rests or by means of articulation marks; or it might be expected to be provided by performers on the basis of their experience and musicality. The functions of accentuation and articulation are broadly similar, and they are often closely linked, especially in defining musical structure.
Articulation can be seen as operating principally on two levels: the structural and the expressive. At the structural level was the articulation of musical phrases and sections, while as an expressive resource, appropriate articulation of individual notes and figures was necessary to vivify a musical idea. Composers attempted, during the course of the period, to provide ever more detailed instructions for articulation in their scores, just as they did with accentuation;
and, as with accents, the performer's task increasingly became one of accurately interpreting the composer's markings, rather than recognizing where it was desirable to supplement or modify the musical text. Yet even in the most carefully notated late nineteenth-century scores much still remained the responsibility of the performer.
Music was predominantly perceived throughout the period as a language, albeit a language which, like poetry, appealed more to the feelings than to the intellect. But the precision with which the language of music expressed the feelings of its creator was considered to be of great importance; Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder's creation, the composer Joseph Berlinger, could hope that the listener ‘will feel on hearing my melodies precisely what I felt in writing them—precisely what I sought to put in them’.259Thus, the separation of
259 Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Berlin, 1797), quoted in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (London, 1952), 759.
phrases and sections was felt to be essential to the proper realization of a composer's musical concept, and the link between music and rhetoric was constantly cited to illustrate the importance of appropriate punctuation for the lucid delivery of a musical discourse. Mattheson's Vollkommene Kapellmeister of 1739, along with other texts from the first half of the eighteenth century, had dealt with the matter in some detail; and many subsequent discussions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries employed much the same terminology. In the early 1770s Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste introduced its extensive consideration of the subject with the remark that ‘The phrase divisions are the commas of the melody which, as in speech, should be made apparent by a small pause’.260Türk, expanding on this in 1789with an even closer analogy between language and music, seemed to suggest a link between the degree of the articulation and its structural function. His account provides a useful digest of the terms used by German theorists:
A musical sentence (a section [Abschnitt]), of which there can be several in a piece, would be that which one calls a sentence in speech and would be separated from the following by a full stop (.). A musical rhythm [Rhythmus] can be compared with the smaller speech unit, which one marks with a colon (:) or semicolon (;). The phrase [Einschnitt261], as the smallest unit, would be that which in speech will only be separated by a comma. If one wanted also to add the caesura [CÄsur], one would have to compare it with the caesura of a verse (Vers).262
Baillot observed similarly in 1834: ‘Notes are used in music like words in speech; they are used to construct a phrase, to create an idea, consequently one should use full stops and commas just as in a written text, to distinguish its sentences and their parts, and to make them easier to understand.’263Habeneck, a few years later, also introduced the subject by remarking: ‘In a melody, as in speech, there are sentences [periodes], phrases, and figures that make up the phrases.’264 In much the same vein, Charles de Bériot began his discussion of musical punctuation, in his Méthode de violon of 1858, with the statement: ‘The object of punctuation in music, as in literature, is to mark the necessary points of repose: we will even add that in music punctuation is more important than in literature because the points of repose are indicated in a more absolute way by the strictness of the time.’265And in 1905 Andreas Moser could still state that the separation and division of phrases has ‘ just about the same significance for music as articulation and punctuation have for speech’.266
But this apparent agreement about basic principles may well mask significant differences in practice. The fact that generations of musicians have repeatedly emphasized the importance of musical punctuation for the proper
260 Art. ‘Vortrag’, iv. 700.
261 Einschnitt, literally a cut or incision, was often used to mean not only the division between musical phrases or figures, but also the phrases or figures themselves.
262 Klavierschule, VI, §32.
263 L'Art du violon, 163.
264 Méthode, 107.
265 p. 226 .
266 Joseph Joachim and Andreas Moser, Violinschule (Berlin, 1905), iii. 13.
expression of a melody and that they have described that punctuation in similar terms does not mean that a musician of 1780 would have rendered it in quite the same manner as one of 1880, any more than actors or orators of different generations and traditions would have adopted the same approach to articulation in speech. Quite apart from other considerations, changes in compositional style brought in their train modified approaches to articulation, as well as to many other aspects of performance. The relationship between rules of ‘correct’ composition and rules of ‘correct’
performance, so often emphasized by eighteenth-century writers,267weakened in the nineteenth century as ‘unfettered genius’268came increasingly to be seen to override prescriptive aesthetic notions. And though older music continued to be performed, indeed began to be performed more frequently as the century advanced, there seems only to have been a limited awareness of historically appropriate performance techniques; the musicians of successive generations tended to apply their own contemporary stylistic criteria to all the music in their repertoire. In particular, it seems possible that the growing emphasis on legato in both composition and performance may have led during the nineteenth century to a less distinct separation of phrases in earlier music, the articulation (where no break in continuity was indicated by the composer) being more often conveyed by accent and dynamic nuance, perhaps, than by an appreciable break in the sound. However, at every stage in this investigation it is important to bear in mind that keyboard instruments, bowed instruments, various kinds of wind instruments and the human voice all have their own mechanisms and imperatives, which affect the execution and application of articulation. The means that are available to the organist or harpsichordist to convey phrasing effectively are quite different from those available to the violinist, flautist, or singer.
It is also necessary to remember that great artists will have displayed individuality just as much in this area as in others, and that any two artists of a given period may well have adopted quite distinctly personal approaches to articulating the same piece of music.
Some of the most obvious differences between periods and performing traditions will become more apparent on closer consideration; many will inevitably remain irrecoverable, for the finer details of performance that distinguish the playing and singing of the most cultivated artists are, as numerous writers pointed out, not susceptible of verbal description. These refinements certainly cannot be fully reconstructed from written accounts, however elaborate; they could only have been appreciated through hearing the artists who were felt to be the representatives of good taste in any particular period.
267 e.g. Türk, Klavierschule, VI, §§23 ff.
268 Emily Anderson, rrans. and ed., The Letters of Beethoven (London, 1961), 1325.
The discussion of structural articulation by J. A. P. Schulz in Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie provides a number of important points about general attitudes in the second half of the eighteenth century.269He began his consideration of the subject by affirming not only that the separation of phrases should occur in the right places but also that it should be distinctly perceptible, asserting: ‘The phrase divisions should be marked in the clearest manner and correctly’ Nevertheless, it is apparent that Schulz did not regard a real break in the sound as the only method of marking the articulation, but also considered it possible to obtain the same end by a diminuendo at the end of a phrase followed by some degree of accentuation at the beginning of the new one, for he stated that it could be achieved ‘either if one takes off the last note of a phrase somewhat and then comes firmly onto the first note of the following phrase; or if one allows the sound to sink somewhat and then raises it with the beginning of the new phrase.’ The distinction may have been envisaged as allowing variety appropriate to different circumstances; or perhaps Schulz was thinking of the fundamental differences between various kinds of instruments: keyboard instruments incapable of dynamic accents such as organ and harpsichord, where the phrase divisions can only be made apparent by separation, clavichord and fortepiano, where subtle degrees of accentuation are also feasible but where the rate at which the sound decays is largely beyond the control of the player, and bowed instruments, wind instruments, and voice, where bow, tongue, or consonants can be used to produce many different types of articulation, and where controlled diminuendo on a single note is possible.
Unlike Türk, Schulz did not imply a direct relationship between the structural function of articulation and its degree, though he recognized the subtle variety that an experienced artist would give it according to context, noting in a footnote:
The word ‘phrase’ will be taken here in the widest meaning, in that the Einschnitts as well as the Abschnitts and sections of the melody will be understood by it. In performance all these divisions will be marked in the same manner; and if great players and singers really observe a shading among them, this is nevertheless so subtle and so complicated to describe that we content ourselves with the mere mention of it.
The rest of his discussion was taken up mainly with the problem of how a performer should recognize the phrase divisions. He conceded that ‘If the phrase ends with a rest there is no difficulty; the phrase division [Einschnitt marks itself on its own.’ He also observed that it should not be a problem for the singer to mark the phrase divisions correctly, ‘because he only has to govern himself by the phrase divisions of the words, above which he sings, with which the phrase division of the melody must exactly accord’; though he acknowledged that difficulties might be encountered in passagework (where the singer had to
269 Art. ‘Vortrag’, iv. 700 ff.
deliver an extended passage to a single syllable). For instrumentalists he suggested that
The main rule which has here to be taken account of is this, that one governs oneself by the beginning of the piece.
A perfectly regular piece of music observes regular phrases throughout: namely whatever beat of the bar it begins with so begin all its phrases with just the same beat. Therefore in the following pieces the notes marked with ○ are those with which the first phrase concludes, and those marked with + those with which the new phrase begins: [Ex.
4.1]
Ex. 4.1. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, art. ‘Vortrag’
Such symmetry was more characteristic of the lighter Galant style of the mid-eighteenth century than of the more emotionally charged and dramatic idioms that were associated with the development of the empfindsamer Stil and what has come to be known as the Viennese Classical style, where movements or sections would be likely to include a variety of contrasting and complementary figures. Recognizing this, Schulz gave an example from the beginning of a C. P. E.
Bach sonata (Ex. 4.2) about which he remarked that in such music the player had to recognize phrase divisions ‘from the character of the melody’. But he indicated that with each new idea, just as with the beginning of a piece, the phrasing could be deduced from the placing of the initial part of the phrase. Thus he remarked that ‘it would be extremely faulty if, for example, one wanted to perform the sixth bar as if the phrase were to begin with its first note, since, in fact, the preceding ends with it, as the quaver rest of the preceding bar indicates.’
Schulz also noted that composers sometimes used modified beaming to indicate the beginnings and ends of phrases, and felt that, since it made the
Ex. 4.2. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, art. ‘Vortrag’
phrase divisions very clear, it was to be preferred to continuous beaming in doubtful cases. He observed:
If, as in the third and fourth examples [Ex. 4.3], the phrase division falls between quavers or semiquavers, which in notational practice are customarily beamed together, some composers are in the habit of separating those which belong to the preceding phrase from those with which the new one begins by the way they write them, in order to indicate the phrase division all the more clearly, namely therefore: [Ex. 4.4]
Ex. 4.3. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, art. ‘Vortrag’
Ex. 4.4. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, art. ‘Vortrag’
(This continued to be used by some composers, for instance Schumann, throughout the nineteenth century; see Ex.
4.5.)
Ex. 4.5. Schumann, Second Symphony op. 61/ii
However, observing that this type of notation could not be used with crotchets and minims, Schulz remarked that in such cases one could ‘use the little stroke I over the last note of the phrase, as some now and again do’. The use of a staccato stroke for this purpose is by no means unusual in music of the period, but, as Türk was to point out, this employment of the stroke to indicate a shortened and lightened final note could easily be mistaken by less experienced players for the more common type of staccato mark, which might imply accent.
Schulz concluded his examination of this subject with some general observations on the importance of correctly articulating phrase divisions, in which
he again highlighted the role of accentuation at the beginning of a figure and weakness at the end in clarifying the phrase structure of a piece. (His marking of the beginning of a phrase with +, the same sign that he had elsewhere employed to mark the notes requiring accentuation, is evidently quite deliberate.) His final paragraph shows the close link between phrasing and structural accentuation, and reinforces other writers’ remarks about the subordination of purely metrical accentuation to these considerations:
It is incredible how greatly the melody becomes disfigured and unclear if the phrase divisions are incorrecdy marked or indeed not marked at all. To convince oneself of this, one ought only to perform a gavotte in such a manner that the phrase divisions at the half-bar are not observed. Easy as this dance is to understand, it will by this means become unrecognizable to everyone. Here again mistakes will most frequently be made in such pieces where the phrases begin in the middle of a bar and indeed on a weak beat; because everyone is from the beginning accustomed to mark prominently only the strong beats of the bar on which the various accents of the melody fall, and to leave the weak beats entirely equal as if they were merely passing. In such cases the phrases then become torn apart through this, part of them being attached to the preceding or following, which is just as preposterous as if in a speech one wanted to make the pause before or after the comma. In the following example [Ex. 4.6], if the phrase division is marked, the melody is good in itself; if however merely the accents of the bar are marked, the melody becomes extremely flat and has the same effect as if, instead of saying: ‘He is my lord; I am his squire’, one wanted to say: ‘He is my lord I; am his squire.’
Ex. 4.6. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, art. ‘Vortrag’
Türk, whose approach shows his intimate knowledge of this and other significant discussions of the subject, made similar points, with some qualifications. Among other things he was particularly insistent, as mentioned above, that the performer should avoid interpreting a staccato mark that was intended to show the end of a phrase as one that was designed to indicate an accent, commenting:
Necessary as it is to lift the finger at the end of a phrase, it is nevertheless faulty to perform it in such a manner that the lifting referred to is allied with a violent staccato, as in example a) [Ex. 4.7]. One hears this faulty execution very frequently when the phrase division is indicated by the usual sign for staccato, as at c). For many players have the incorrect idea that a staccato note—as one calls it in artistic language—must always be staccatoed with a certain violence.270
270 Klavierschule, VI, §22.
Ex. 4.7. Türk, Klavierschule, VI, 2, §22
It should be remembered that when Türk mentioned lifting the finger, he was referring to keyboard playing. Schulz, dealing with the matter in a general way, envisaged phrase division being accomplished either through real separation or through demarcation of the phrase by means of accent and decrescendo, while Türk only mentioned the former.
Rather than using a staccato mark to indicate the shortening of the final note of a phrase, Türk proposed an alternative sign that would not give rise to such confusion and that, at the same time, would facilitate the recognition of ‘the smaller, less perceptible phrase divisions’ (Ex. 4.8.) And he explained that he had already used this in his Leichte Klaviersonaten of 1783.
Ex. 4.8. Türk, Klavierschule, VI, 2, §22
One thing to which neither Schulz nor Türk alluded as a factor in the recognition or separation of phrases and figures was the slur, though, according to theorists, this was generally acknowledged to require not only accentuation of the initial note under the slur but also shortening of the final one; indeed, Türk specifically warned against shortening the final note under three- and four-note slurs in certain circumstances.271For most eighteenth-century composers the slur seems far more to have been associated with the character of a particular musical idea than with structural phrasing.
As a means of developing a good sense of phrasing Türk also recommended, together with practising dance pieces, as suggested by Schulz, the practice of songs by good composers.272(In this period Lieder were often printed like key-board music on two staves with the melody doubled by the keykey-board player's right hand throughout, and with the words set between the staves; keyboard players could therefore regulate their phrasing by the punctuation of the text.)
As a means of developing a good sense of phrasing Türk also recommended, together with practising dance pieces, as suggested by Schulz, the practice of songs by good composers.272(In this period Lieder were often printed like key-board music on two staves with the melody doubled by the keykey-board player's right hand throughout, and with the words set between the staves; keyboard players could therefore regulate their phrasing by the punctuation of the text.)