A good melody can pull at your heart strings, transmit the most complex emotions, or make dancing irresistible. Melodies tend to derive their good qualities from natural patterns found in speech from all over the world (understanding the aesthetics of a particular culture’s music is easier when you compare the music to the language!). Accented syllables, smooth note bends, and sudden changes in volume contribute to a living and breathing version of an otherwise colorless public speaker or performer. Songs themselves take shape like a good story or movie: musicians ebb and flow from a serene quiet to a dramatic loud in order to breathe life into the music. The following are some basic ways of communicating these musical flavors.
We’ve learned about pitches and rhythm. The last piece of our musical puzzle involves how our notes are played. Dynamics represent relative loudness and are important for making songs expressive and jams fun. Articulations are specific ways that notes should be played and is largely dependent on the instrument at hand.
First of all, the following is formal language. It is very useful, but don’t underestimate the power of normal language to get the job done! I’ve presented the terms with their common-language equivalents.
Volume Dynamics
• (P) Piano - quiet, soft
• (F) Forte - loud, strong
• (MP) Mezzo piano - slightly soft, louder than piano
• (MF) Mezzo forte - slightly loud, softer than forte
• (PP) Pianissimo - very quiet, more piano
• (FF) Fortissimo - very loud, more forte
Articulations
The most common articulations in musical language describe how long a given note should be played in a way that’s more specific than the rhythmic notation we’ve learned. It’s simpler than it sounds!
The dots below (above in some instances) each note indicate that each note should be short and punchy, like the ticking of a clock. This is called staccato.
This next one tends to be the default way of playing or singing notes, though it can be emphasized more depending on the situation. Here we have the notes connected with a phrase mark, which indicates that we should play them very smoothly from one to the next, like we’re reading a line of poetry. This is called legato. It doesn’t make sense to say that a single note is legato because legato is dependent on a note’s relationship to other notes around it.
This next one indicates that we should strongly accent certain notes (play it louder or stronger), and is technically a form of marcato. However, it’s rare to actually hear this word in use; musicians tend to stick to the word “accent” to describe this articulation.
There are plenty more articulations that occur in written music, some of them depending entirely on what instrument you are playing. In fact, some of these articulations have an entirely different meaning if you’re playing a different instrument. These, however, encompass most of our day-to-day musical language.
• Staccato - short, punchy
• Legato - smooth, poetic
• Accent (marcato) - louder, stronger
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