The Short

228 NOTATION OF ARTICULATION AND PHRASING
? a light touch and not quite legato [(meist nach einer Note mit‸) leichtere Tongeben und unvollkommene Bindung
[Abzug)—(mostly after a note with ‸) lighter delivery of the note and imperfect connection (Abzug)]
? (comma) indicates a short [(meist kurzen)—(mostly short)] pause not otherwise marked, especially before the reentering
of a theme.
The last two signs are certainly confined, for the most part, to didactic works. It is interesting to note that although the
implication of accent is present in Riemann's definition of the staccato stroke, his explanation of the horizontal line and
the horizontal line with dot here contains no suggestion of added weight.
Slurs and Articulation
The principal meaning of the slur was to signify that the notes within it should be smoothly connected to one another,
as in a vocal melisma or a figure performed by a string player in a single, continuous and even bowstroke. The slur
may carry other messages about the execution of the legato phrase, which must be deduced partly from the period,
background, and notational habits of the composer, and partly from the musical context. It is important, for instance,
to determine whether the music is conceived in terms of strings, wind, keyboard or voice, whether it shows other
evidence of having been notated with care, and so on. Since the ‘natural’ pre-classical bowstroke implied a degree of
accent at the start, and an element of separation between strokes, there was an early tendency to see that style of
performance as, to a certain extent, inherent in the notation and integral to the meaning of the slur in music for other
instruments.
Slurs, or signs that are graphically indistinguishable from slurs, however, could signify a number of quite different
things. In vocal music the slur might be used, in its general sense of legato, to clarify the grouping of notes on a single
syllable (though this was not a consistent convention during the period); but it might also specify an audible
portamento, sometimes between notes on different syllables of text. 389 Of course, the same sign often means a tie, but it
may not in all instances indicate a simple prolongation of the note. One persistent curiosity of notation that certainly
remained common until the generation of Berlioz and Schumann was the practice of using a two-beat note tied to a
one-beat note instead of a two-beat note with a dot in feminine cadences or similar contexts (Ex. 6.28,) and it seems
likely that the notation was intended to warn the performers with the sustained note that they should nuance it in the
normal manner required for such cadences. What Beethoven meant by his occasional use of notes that appear to be
superfluously tied, most notably in the Gro\e Fuge op. 133, remains questionable; but he may well have intended
something
389 See Ch. 15.