The Short

Interestingly, Fröhlich (or rather the author from whom he pirated his material) did not acknowledge the clarinet to be
capable of such a wide range of staccato attack as either oboe or bassoon, and no strokes, only dots, occur in the
clarinet section of his tutor.
In fact, among German musicians, while the accent effect of staccato was more or less universally recognized, there
seems to have been considerable doubt about the degree of separation required. A. B. Marx proposed a less extreme
shortening of the notes than Adam, regarding the stroke as shortening a note by a half and the dot by a quarter, but
cautioned that ‘In both cases the exact amount of time that is to be subtracted from their original value remains
undecided.’ 375 Marx's older contemporary Johann Daniel Andersch also seems to have felt that performers should be
careful not to make too much separation, for he gave the following definition of ‘Abstossen, Staccare, Détaché’: ‘Deliver
the notes short and somewhat prominently, without, however, making their separation strikingly perceptible to the
ear.’ 376
In string playing the seeds of confusion over the meaning of the two signs in terms of bowstroke (therefore also of
accent, length etc.) were sprouting vigorously by the 1830s; 377 and agreement over the significance of staccato marks in
general can hardly have been helped by Spohr's employment of them in his influential Violinschule of 1832 (which used
strokes throughout, except under slurs), for, as mentioned above, having given an exercise consisting of quavers
marked with staccato strokes (Ex. 6.18,) Spohr instructed the pupil:
each note receives a separate bowing. This bowing (called by the French, détaché) is made with a steady back-arm
and as long strokes as possible, at the upper part of the bow. The notes must be perfectly equal both in power and
duration, and succeed each other in such a manner, that, in changing from the down to the up-bow or the reverse,
no break or chasm may be observed. 378
Yet, making no notational differentiation, he also used staccato strokes in passages where he specified the short, sharp,
martelé bowstroke, which required both accent and separation. 379
Ex. 6.18. Spohr, Violin School, 118
375
Universal School, 76.
376
Musikalisches Wörterbuch (Berlin, 1829), art. ‘Abstossen’.
377
See Ch. 3.
378
Violin School, 118.
379
Particular relationships between staccato notation and string bowing are further considered in Ch. 7 below.
DOTS AND STROKES 217