Picking up on the spiccato thread but not to muddy the water I'll start another thread. How does one actually know if the dots indicate staccato or spicatto? If I don't already know the piece of music I'm playing I'm never sure which I'm suppose to do unless it is specifically indicated.

Any clues? Are we free to choose if the composer doesn't stipulate.

well try it out and see what sounds right, spiccato is generrally a lot light, staccato is heavier if you know what i mean. Spiccato i believe is always played when the staccato dots have slur marks over them.

Over here in the land of wine and cheese, staccato is generally understood to mean slurred, detached notes in one up-bow - played on the string. Spiccato is a bouncing stroke played with separate bows and off the string.

Dots over notes generally indicate what they call grand détaché - which is separate bows, but really short note values - a bit like you would play staccato on a piano. Real staccato is indicated with dots and a slur and spiccato is usually marked with spicc.

Hope this helps!

sorry i got that wrong, spiccato is not slurred, staccato has the slur line, because you are using the full bow going in one direction, spiccato you change it everytime.

Sorry lol

Yes confusing isn't it

But thanks anyway and to Rosfrog. I don't have problems with the different types of bowing it's just I don't always know what type they're asking me to do so unless it says spicc I'll stick to stacc.

Cheers my dears.

Ah well, I think if it's not clear in the score, you can choose how you want to interpret the music - let's not forget that even as classical musicians we can interpret how we want - traditional western classical music has turned us into robots a lot of the time. I reckon we can take it back and play it how we want, making the music live... hum.

Allan

Yes I agree - Rosfrog - if we all played everything exactly the same music would stagnate and become mechanical rather than expressive - and fun.

Ciao,

Goldfinch

Staccato is only slurred when it has a slur line (semi-staccato). But it's often written with no slur line, and then it should be bowed out (like spiccato but on the string).

It's funny how things vary from one place to another, isn't it? In France staccato is always slurred, if it's separate bows, it' just called détaché - with modifiers like 'détaché court' or 'le grand détaché', that kind of thing.

This is probably all linked to the fact that these things were never really set in stone and even classical artists probably did a lot more improvisation and very personalised interpretation in the composer's day, whereas now we're conditioned to think that everything must be played exactly as written with as little personal feeling as possible. Sad...

I stand corrected! I didn't know it was different in France.

So what is louré?
I asked my oboe teacher this some time ago but didn't really get what I considered a satisfactory answer since he said it was a bit like string players playing staccato and I said but why the slur and he said because it's staccato and since for me staccato didn't have slurs, at that point, I gave up.

According to Grove's it's an 'articulated slur' - now is that clear!!

Theoretically I suppose so, but I still don't really understand how to play it but as I am in the wrong forum (I want to play it on the oboe) I will withdraw.

When fiddlers talk about louré here, they tend to mean slurred notes with a slight stop in between them, but not staccato... dunno who this works on the oboe though !