The Short

DOTS AND STROKES 245
used in string music to indicate a Bebung with the bow, for instance in Gluck's operas, sometimes in conjunction with
the instruction ‘tremolando’.
In string music, portato rather than a staccato was generally indicated by the theorists for accompaniment figures
where notes were repeated at the same pitch. Indeed, Giuseppe Maria Cambini suggested in about 1800 that this style
of bowing should be used whenever ‘piano’, ‘dolce’, or‘piano dolce’ were written, even though the composer had not
specifically indicated a portato bowing; and to mark this bowstroke, Cambini used either dots or a wavy line. 433 But as
the descriptions of Quantz, Mozart, and Reichardt imply, a considerable variation in pressure and separation was
current.
A final example from an eighteenth-century treatise introduces the possibility of executing slurred staccato where none
seems to be indicated. In his Anweisung zum Violinspielen of 1792 J. A. Hiller explained that if dots (without a slur) occur,
‘as long as these dots should not merely be strokes, they signify a totally different kind of performance, which in artistic
language is called punto d'arco (attack with the bow). In this case several of the notes thus marked are taken in one
bowstroke and brought out shortly by a jerk of the bow’; he later added that ‘the punto d'arco can most easily be made
with the up-bow from the point of the bow up to the middle’. 434 As his music example confirms, he is referring to the
staccato in a single bowstroke at a moderate tempo, which other authors designated by dots under a slur or strokes
under a slur. He added that soloists can attempt this bowstroke at much faster tempos. Hiller used the notation of dots
under a slur to mean portato, but seems to have meant (the passage is far from clear) that the same notation could also
be used for the ‘punto d'arco’; it certainly was used by others in this sense. 435
In the eighteenth-century use of this notation there is evidently an area of uncertainty where the type of execution
envisaged is on the borderline between portato and staccato. This is very clearly brought out in Koch's definition of
‘Piquiren’ in his 1802 Lexikon:
With this expression one denotes a particular kind of bowstroke on string instruments by which many stepwise
notes following on from one another are given with a very short staccato …; e.g. [Ex. 6.44(a)]
One leaves the performance of running notes in a quick tempo to solo players who have particularly practised this;
however, on notes which are repeated at the same pitch and performed at a moderate tempo one also uses this kind
of stroke in orchestral parts; e.g. [Ex. 6.44(b)]
Nineteenth-century sources reveal a number of different preoccupations. Several of the markings dealt with by
eighteenth-century writers became largely obsolete; the Gluck tremolando and the Bebung gradually disappeared
433
Nouvelle Méthode théorique et pratique pour le violon (Paris, c. 1800), 23.
434
pp. 41 ff .
435
For another, somewhat different, use of the term punta
Bowing’.
(punto ) d'arco that seems also to have been current in the late 18th c. and early 19th c. see below, Ch. 7, ‘String