Staccato

[Stral]

A thought just came to me the other day about staccato, and I thought it would be interesting to share it with everyone here and see what kind of feedback I get.  Now I'm pretty sure we all know what a staccato note sounds like and how it should be played.  Or do we?  

In performances and in my own personal experience, I have discovered that there are many ways to play the same staccato note or series of notes.  This of course holds true for many other types of phrases, there are infinately many ways to play each.  But which is proper?  

For example, if you are to play a staccato quarter note, does one play the note itself as quickly as possible, like a start-stop blip while treating the rest of the note as a rest?  Or on the other hand, it is also possible to play the note in its entirety before breaking off the tone suddenly (almost as one halts legato play to move from phrase to phrase).  I have heard many pieces performed in both ways, and I am sure you have too.  

The question is, which one is "more" proper?  How can one truly know what the composer had in mind when s/he wrote that dot over/under the note?  It seems to me that the decision is mostly arbitrary.  

I mostly use the first method I described; whereby you play the staccato note quickly, and treat the rest of the time left in the note as a rest.  It certainly makes me wonder why quarter/eighth/whatever notes are used for staccato notation, when in reality if my method of play was correct what could be used would instead be some infinitesimal measure, with rests used to annote the time waiting to play the next note or sequence.  

Is this something that can be left up to "personal style" or is there a correct way to play staccato notes for each piece?

[Hmoll]

Stral,

Very good question, and one that is difficult to answer.
There are different types of staccatos, which I won't get into, but some basics:
As a general rule, an eighth note staccato will be shorter than a quarter note staccato because of the relative lengths of the two notes, and composers know this and use either eighth, quarter, half notes, etc, to indicate longer or shorter staccatos.
Staccato indications are also used to indicate finger articulation. For example, there is a lot of music where the composer intended the damper pedal be used during passages marked staccato. That is because even with the pedal down, a legato touch still sounds different than staccato touch.

To make things even more complicated, stylistic considerations come into play a lot as well. Staccato in a Mozart sonata is  very different than staccato in a Beethoven sonata.

This is just a quick answer to a topic that one could write a book on.

[rachfan]

Yes, today we often automatically think of staccato as a quick withdrawing of the finger from the key as if it were a hot coal.  Yet in the 19th century many pedagogues presented the concept entirely differently in their writings.  The staccato was considered more a precise lessening of the value of a particular note, such as treating a quarter note more like an eighth, with rules to be followed.  During that era, there were two kinds of staccato notation.  One was the dot, which we commonly see today.  That was originally meant to signify the precise lessening of note value approach.  Then there was the solid, vertical wedge, which indicated the "hot coal" finger withdrawal approach.  Over time and moving into the 20th century, composers abandoned the wedge in favor of the universal use of the dot notation.  Thus, the resulting ambiguity and the reason for your question here.  So yes, there must be consideration of the period, style, performance practices, and interpretation for proper execution of the composer's intent.  In playing a piece from the Vienese Classical era, if it were to contain dots and wedges, then I would observe those directions.  In Romantic and later works, I would opt for the hot coal approach, as that seems to comport more with modern thinking on execution.

Incidentally, when you see a staccato mark under a legato phrase, it has nothing whatever to do with staccato.  Rather, that calls specifically for portato touch, which is a more weighty, and ponderous but also a strictly nonlegato (i.e., neither staccato nor legato)  treatment of those notes so indicated.

[Stral]

Thank you both for your insightful replies.  I learn something new every day, especially around here.