In this segment we're going to talk about the final expressive element.
We've talked about tempo, we talked about dynamics.
Now we're going to talk about what we call articulations.
All that means is
the way that we - we usually use the term "attack" the notes.
It's not a really good choice of terms because it sounds like we're been doing
battle with the notes, which we hope not to be doing.
but it has to do with the
stroke of a note. If you're playing something like a piano where you actually
do strike it. If you're an instrumentalist it has to do with how
your tongue is releasing in your instrument. If you're playing percussion
it has to do with how -
what kind of mallet you're using, how you're striking the bars
or the drumhead. So there's a lot of different ways that it's produced, but we use
the same sort of terminology
no matter what kind of instrument is doing the performing.
We could say that most notes - we'll just call them straight. We just sort of do
them la la la la la, you know, they're
our pitches here, but that can be boring over time. We need more variety
than that in our use of rhythmic structures.
So some things that we can do are to
connect the notes making very smooth together.
Let me see, what can I do that's nice and smooth?
"Jingle Bells" is not a smooth tune, we don't want to go there.
Hmm, maybe I will do it.
That's my legato version of "Jingle Bells." The notes are very connected to
one another
if I were singing it, la la la la la.
I'm not a singer, remember. La la la la la.
There's not a gap in between. If you think about when you talk,
you don't talk like this. You connect your notes together, you
make them smooth. So the word for that smooth connection between the notes is
legato. There are some other fancier terms that for most part that's all
we'll talk about.
So, smooth and connected - legato. As you're listening to music,
a lot of times when you think about really pretty music it's connected
and smooth like that.
Another thing we can do is called staccato.
If you played in your high school band or took lessons somewhere
down the line, someone said to you that staccato means short.
Well it doesn't. Staccato just means shorter,
shorter than it used to be. So we could take
our "Jingle Bells" which was
whichever segment in there, and that was legato. I could put just a tiny space in
between the notes
(Playing "Jingle Bells".)
That's still staccato.
It's got a little bit of space in between. I could make it
really staccato,
in which case it is short.
But the real meaning of staccato is to put space in between the notes.
Whether we choose to make it really sharply staccato like I did the second
time or just
that kind of staccato,
is again going to depend on the style of the piece or the affect you're trying to create.
We have legato, which is very smoothly connected, and we have staccato, which
is disconnected basically. There are also things that we can do
to emphasize notes, and we call those accents.
That's easy because it's a word we use in language, you know, going to accent
this word or put stress on it. There are lots of different kinds of
accents. I could put some in weird places.
(Playing "Jingle Bells.")
Just putting an emphasis on something. You can play it a little bit louder,
if you're a wind instrumentalist and you're using your tongue you're going
to get a "tuhh" sound.
You're going to hear more tongue sound coming through the instrument.
There are lots of ways to accomplish it and there lots of levels
of accents. So you could have really strong accents -
we mark them with little things that look like houses, we call these house tops.
They sort of look like roofs of houses, that mean really
nail that note. We might have this kind of accent that tells us
just to give it a little extra push. So lots of different kinds of
accents but basically you're listening for a stress,
usually one you didn't expect. I'm actually playing in an
orchestra and we're playing this piece that's in simple duple meter so it was
like "dum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum"
but they've got accents put in so that I'm supposed to sound like I'm playing in
three so it's like
(sings tune with accents)
That's hard to do because you're looking at notes that are in patterns of two
but you're supposed to be accenting in patterns of three. So that's a way
that the composer can
sort of throw of the audience as well because everything else is sort of
plugging along nicely duple and all of a sudden you hear this
odd little triple accent coming in there, so those are the things that we do
to give you even more interest to the rhythmic structure
and the melodic structure. We can make things legato, we can make them
staccato, and we can use accents so those are basically the three kinds of
articulation that we use.
As we look at down some different kinds of instruments and pieces we'll also see
that
that some instruments have their own special things that they can do
to create different kinds of articulations, but we'll look at those as
we look at those pieces.