Maintaining direction in staccato passages

In my last post, I pointed out that staccato notes are not always exactly “detached,” even though they may give that impression. Now let’s consider how this sense of detachment, real or false, can disrupt a phrase.

To make a legato phrase sound like a unified idea, all I have to do as a minimum is make sure my air doesn’t stop: my fingers and tongue delineate individual notes, but the sound is continuous. But with a staccato phrase, the sound stops (at least sort of). We could perhaps visualize it this way, with each box representing a note:

staccato notes

There’s not a clear sense of continuity—each note is an island.

But I can make the notes sound like they belong together, without eliminating the space between them. For example, suppose I give the passage a subtle crescendo:

staccato notes, with crescendo

The space between the notes is the same, but now there is a clear relationship. It’s obvious that the individual notes, though detached, make up a single structure and not six separate ones.

A bit of crescendo is a reliable and tasteful way to do this in many cases, but really any variable aspect of musical expression could ostensibly be used: decrescendo, change in tone color, change in vibrato, accelerando or ritardando, or just about anything else that can be varied continuously across a group of notes. Make sure each note you play serves a larger phrase!

Sometimes staccato is neither “short” nor “separated”

A wind instrument doesn’t resonate in the same way as, say, a violin: when the wind player stops blowing, the sound stops immediately. But since our modern wind technique borrows so heavily from the bowed string tradition, in many cases it is necessary to imitate this resonance to achieve the desired effect.

Teaching multiple instruments in higher education

While I thoroughly enjoy the variety in my day, there are some additional things worth considering if you take on multiple instruments in a collegiate teaching career.

Favorite blog posts, January 2014

Hand-picked high-quality woodwind-related blog posts from around the web, January 2014 edition.