Staccato or Not Staccato? What's In a Dash?

Objective observation of these two markings affirms over and over again my feeling that there is, indeed, a difference: Staccato (i.e., the dot) indicates a detached tone within a prevailing meter.  The dash (that upright mark) indicates a detached tone against the prevailing meter.  In other words, a regular staccato will not alter your sense of where the beat belongs.  A dash staccato, on the other hand, wants to do just that.

It gets tricky in triple meters where one is never sure exactly what kind of meter is in play, whether that of the time signature or a hemiola-type augmentation (a la the minuet) or a courente-type diminution.

Having just reviewed the markings in two Mozart Sonatas, I can hear how players of today have little notion of such subtleties.  We live in an era of beats pounding into beats, all predictable.  Yow.

Don't do this to Mozart.  Or Beethoven.  Or anyone else, for that matter.

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A Rest! What MIght It Mean?

If it's by Mozart it means "Watch out!"  You never know with him.  More often than not it is a deceptive tactic inserted into the line to tease you into thinking you know what you're doing when it turns out that it was put there merely to call attention to a line by interrupting it.

He has been known to do this sometimes at double bars; also between movements.

I know: you were taught, as I was, that phrases had beginnings and ends and that rests were one indication of punctuation.  Ah me! another lesson to outlive.

Tones and Talking

So far removed from singing we have forgotten that voices are music.

Recognizing an unnaturally high-pitched voice is familiar to anyone who has lived with a person who could not control their muscle tone, or someone who is tense if not downright angry all the time.

But we are so far removed from the center of our voices, especially now that we text all the time (at least some of us do), that making this analogy have meaning in terms of an instrument is an uphill battle.

Pitch is not abstract.  It is always related to some identifiable source in nature or in the mechanized universe, even if "only" an imagined source like planetary rotation.

The piano talks.  Simple.  At least it used to before pianists stopped enjoying that feature of its mechanism and began training all their fingers to be equally muscle-bound, and demanding that all keys, white and black, be correspondingly interchangeable.

Woe.

Recordings are not Music

'Twere better far not to listen to recordings but instead to hum one's own when hungry for music.

The ready supply of repertoire on demand removes us ah so far from the essence of the art which is VIBRATIONS.  

Fuer Elise Does Not Require Genius

In an on-line discussion about the well-known, often maligned work of Beethoven someone commented that it would take a genius to impart original insight into it.  (That is my rewording of the comment made, I must say, by an invisible person rendered toneless and expression-deprived as only the Internet can render.)  

All that is required is the ability to hear.  The work is brilliantly crafted to blur the boundaries between a black key and a white key so that, at the beginning of the piece, they almost become one tone, like a trill.  Later Beethoven stipulates that they should be clearly articulated in pairs, the black key coming first (unlike the beginning), as if to spell the real, right name of the dedicatee, Therese, not Elise.

Thus: consonant ( = black key) E /  consonant   E /  consonant  E.
Th was one letter in the German of his day, pronounced like our letter T.  D#, spelled enharmonically, is E-flat, which in German is called Ess, the letter S.

Note that the famously difficult B section contains 7 unmatched measures, the number of letters in the name -- if you, for purposes of asymetry, disentangle the T from the h in Th.  Fun, games, a tremendous amount of intimate ingenuity.

I love this piece and play it as what it clearly is, a love message.

Why Assign Mozart Sonatas?

Giving piano students Mozart Sonatas to learn as if they were Himalayas begging to be climbed is a sure sign that the teacher is a victim of stunted growth.  Sorry for the oversimplification, but I was mystified when, as an adult, professional level student, I was assigned an incomprehensibly difficult Mozart Sonata (D major, K. 576).  What was I to do with this enormously complex music?

The assumption behind such assignments is that if one can only play the notes the music will follow.  This strikes me as backwards.

I have seen students who, drawn to Mozart solely by their ear, dig and dig into the notes defying technical levels or categories of preparedness.

The prevailing assumption seems to be that the ear does not, in fact, convey or grasp meaning.