Legato, Staccato, and everything in between

 

As you are probably aware, legato means smoothly connected without breaks between the notes, and staccato means the notes are detached. However, there is a great deal more to know about this, but most importantly, how to achieve these sounds.

In all likelihood, at your earliest piano lessons, your teacher showed you how to play legato by holding your finger on the key until the next key is played, thus having no gap of silence between them. If you lift your finger off the key, the damper comes down onto the string and the sound stops. So therefore you'd want the second note to be played just as the damper is going to come down on the first note, not too late (creating a gap) or too early (blurring the two notes together). While technically correct, there is a LOT more to playing true legato. You could hold each note until the next one plays, but if you play with exaggerated separate finger actions, or a separate hand/arm action on each note, you get what I call a "note-wise" sound. This note-wise sound is the hallmark of an absolute beginner. It may technically meet the definition of legato, but the music would have no "flow," no phrasing, no forward motion. It would lack "musicality." To create and convey a legato sound in the larger sense, there needs to be connection between the tones which is created by an integrated technique of arm, hand, and fingers. The legato would be heard in the phrase, not just from note to note.

We could say that legato is the default. That is, if the composer has not indicated otherwise, we assume we want a connected sound.

When your teacher taught staccato, she may have said to hop quickly off the note, or use your finger in a plucking motion, or any number of other descriptions as to how to achieve a very short sound, meaning the damper comes down quickly and stops the sound. However, I always like to ask "how staccato is staccato?" It can be very short, moderately short, or only slightly short. The little dot above or below the note doesn't tell you which; it is up to you. It depends on the music. If it is in a very fast piece, it is likely to be quite short. If it is in a slow piece, it may be only slightly detached. Your musical judgement will come into play. I prefer the word "detached" to the word staccato because it implies there is a range, not just one value.

You might assume that to detach the notes you'd need finger action. However, detached (or staccato) is just an absence of holding they key. Is not essentially a different technique than playing legato. If you are "hopping" off the key, or trying to "pluck" it, or doing other extraneous movements with your fingers, you are going to have a choppy sound. And, you are being quite inefficient, and would have trouble doing staccato at a fast tempo.

Even with staccato, we want a feeling of legato underneath it. We still want the music to have the flow and the phrasing mentioned above. We don't want it to sound mechanical just because the notes are detached. In other words, staccato passages must still be beautiful. The fingers, hand and arm are in a coordinated technique just as they are for legato playing; the fingers are not working in isolation.

In my next post, I will discuss slurs, which are widely misunderstood.