From the course: Learning Music Notation
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Articulations
- [Instructor] In combination with dynamic markings and text expressions, articulations and slurs indicate to musicians how a composer intends a piece to be performed. First, articulations are symbols or markings that communicate how an individual note is to be bowed, picked, or tongued. Let's take a look at the most common articulations and related symbols. So articulation placement is important. They typically go on the note head side, not on the stem side, and they are centered above the note head, and for the most part, these symbols go outside the staff. So an articulation probably everybody's heard of is the staccato marking, and that's simply a dot that goes above or below the note head. Now the meaning of this is to play the note half the value that it's actually notated at. So in this case, we see quarter notes with staccato markings. Now you could roughly get the same thing by notating an eighth note and then an eighth rest, and another eighth note and an eighth rest and so…
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