page_title: Articulation (music)
section_title: Types of articulations
hierarchical_section_title: Articulation (music) / Types of articulations
caption_attribution_description: English: Thematic development in Hebrides Overture, with staccato articulation
context_page_description: Articulation is a fundamental musical parameter that determines how a single note or other discrete event is sounded. Articulations primarily structure an event's start and end, determining the length of its sound and the shape of its attack and decay. They can also modify an event's timbre, dynamics, and pitch. Musical articulation is analogous to the articulation of speech, and during the Baroque and Classical periods it was taught by comparison to oratory.
  Western music has a set of traditional articulations that were standardized in the 19th Century and remain widely used. Composers are not limited to these, however, and may invent new articulations as a piece requires. When writing electronic and computer music, composers can design articulations from the ground up.
  In addition to following instructions given by composers, performers choose how to articulate the events of a score independently, in accordance with their interpretation of it. Until the 17th Century, it was rare to mark articulations in a score, and even during the Baroque period they were uncommon apart from ornaments, leaving them up to the performer and the standards of the time.
context_section_description: There are many types of articulation, each with a different effect on how the note is played. In music notation articulation marks include the slur, phrase mark, staccato, staccatissimo, accent, sforzando, rinforzando, and legato. A different symbol, placed above or below the note (depending on its position on the staff), represents each articulation.
  
  The third movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) exemplifies the effective use of contrast between staccato and legato within the same passage of music:
  
  Varying the articulation of a theme can play a role in musical development.  For example,  Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture opens with a phrase played legato:
  
  This idea later re-emerges played staccato as Mendelssohn develops it across the orchestral  texture:
caption: Thematic development in Hebrides Overture, with staccato articulation
exif: {}