The Short

216 NOTATION OF ARTICULATION AND PHRASING
tone off the Note not above half its natural Length.’ 371 (On the organ and harpsichord, of course, any degree of
percussive accent would have been impossible.) And John Erhardt Weippert's The Pedal Harp Rotula (1800) said simply
that strokes or dots show that the notes ‘must be played in a very distinct manner’, giving a musical example in which
half of each staccato note, of whatever length, is replaced by a rest. 372 In 1801 Clementi, in a similar vein, referred to
staccato marks merely in terms of length, observing that the Italian word staccato denotes ‘DISTINCTNESS, and
SHORTNESS of sound’, 373 and his explanation of the various degrees of staccato, which he designates by strokes, dots,
and dots under slurs, was entirely in terms of length. Louis Adam's 1804Méthode, in many respects indebted to
Clementi, went a small stage further by defining these three degrees of staccato as in Ex. 6.16. This simple definition
was taken up by many later nineteenth-century writers. However, as has already been mentioned in the section on
accent marks, there was a growing divergence between those (predominantly keyboard players) who focused on the
shortening aspect of staccato and those who emphasized its accent properties.
Ex. 6.16. Adam, Méthode, 154–5
Fröhlich's treatment of the execution of staccato in oboe playing, although employing the same distinctions of strokes,
dots, and dots under slurs, contrasts with that of the pianists just mentioned. He observed:
On account of clarification for the student we will give a threefold specification of the types of nuances of the socalled
tongue staccato [Zungen-Stosse]; the first, where the notes are staccatoed very short and with the greatest
possible power, is notated as at a); the second, which we could call the soft staccato in contrast to the first, the
hardest, in which the staccato is not executed with that force, but where, so to speak, the note receives some check
during the staccato itself, is notated as at b); finally the third, yet more gently treated, with its own soft character,
which almost depicts the connection between staccato and legato, is shown as at c). [Ex. 6.17] 374
Ex. 6.17. Fröhlich, Musikschule, ii. 40
371
(London, [c. 1790]), 4.
372
The Pedal Harp Rotula, and New Instructions for that Instrument (London, [c.1800]), 5.
373
Introduction, 9.
374
Musikschule, ii. 40.