Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2020 October 5

= October 5 =

Was there a discontinuous violin sounds fad in the 1700s?
Just a hunch. Did more continuous violining become more popular in the 1800s? If so any reason why as neither style seems better than the other. i.e. staccato and "intermittent violin sounds" parts of Vivaldi sound cool, Adagio For Strings is beautiful. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:52, 5 October 2020 (UTC)


 * I guess that by "continuous" you mean legato. Legato and staccato are extremes in the usual spectrum of musical articulation. If you take the violin part of Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 1 as an example, you can see that he uses both legato and staccato passages, thereby achieving a contrast. The first movement is almost entirely legato, punctuated by some brief staccato passages, while for instance variation IV of the second movement is almost entirely non-legato with quite some staccato. There was a dramatic change in how composers notated their music between 1600 and 1700. While Beethoven's manuscripts indicate precisely the dynamics, ornaments and articulation, only one century earlier this was left to the discretion of the performers. Obviously, the better performers would interpret the scores in the best way they could to achieve an optimnal effect, and I am convinced that this also included using variation in the articulation. --Lambiam 09:12, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * In this video you can read the score of Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 1 while listening to a performance. --Lambiam 09:44, 5 October 2020 (UTC)