His major concern is to cultivate a melodic, long staccato well suited to the average situation in Classical music.
The end of the Farkas discussion of tonguing in The Art of French Horn Playing has to do with a normal, medium staccato. Perhaps the most accurate description of the articulation would be the syllable “tooh” or “tuh”. Simply stop all air pressure immediately, at the moment the note is to stop.
It is not a beautiful sound when used for only one note, but when a series of them are played, the result will be a very cleanly defined staccato.Ī word of caution: never stop the air column abruptly by using the tongue, as in forming the articulation “toot”. Make it end abruptly, giving the note a “dry”, quick ending. Don’t stop the air column with a tapered ending. The air column is then forcibly stopped, almost at the moment the note starts sounding….
Next he gets to the topic of how to insert space between the notes. The object is to get the note started immediately and as cleanly as possible.įarkas in this brief passage clearly notes a different general tongue placement for staccato than he did for regular articulations, tonguing further forward on the teeth. The tongue forms the articulation “too” in a very definite and hard manner, touching well forward on the upper front teeth. …the player makes both ends of the note as “dry” as possible and the middle of as short duration as possible. One of my teachers was fond of saying “you never know how short some idiot, I mean conductor, will ask you to play it.” Farkas noted that for these extremely short notes There is a great value to being able to play as short as possible. Therefore, if we can learn to play rapid staccato passages we should be able to play all staccato passages. The prime consideration of staccato is to have space between the notes and the faster the passage, the less time there is to produce the notes and the spaces. Philip Farkas in The Art of French Horn Playing notes that I will give them both long quotes to make their cases. First up are two big name horn pedagogues, and they will be the focus of this part I on the topic of staccato. One of those approaches I strongly agree with and the other I can see their point but … well, more on what I think later. There are speaking broadly two approaches to staccato presented in horn methods. Continuing on the topic of tonguing, we finally turn officially to staccato tonguing.