In music, articulation describes not only joining and separating but also the nature of these actions. The marking of the beat by appropriate articulation and the theory of rhetorical pronunciation in the art of musical performance formed the basis of the rules of playing. These were the rules of the organisation of musical movement. The concept of agogics emerged (from the Greek agōgē—“leading”), which was understood as small variations of rhythm and tempo related to the interpretation of a work or part of it. The concept was introduced into music theory in 1884 by Hugo Riemann, who considered its main principle to be the interaction of strong (heavy) moments (agogic accent) and weak (light) moments, although in practice this method of playing in a lively, creative way had been employed as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century. How could Claudio Monteverdi manage without agogics with his “agitated style” (stile concitato)?

As defined by Riemann, agogics is a slight deviation in tempo arising from the character of the movement dictated by the musical phrase. Dynamics of tempo were necessary to avoid mechanical (metronomic) movement, so-called rhythmic playing, which is common practice among performers. After all, the human body does not like constancy, monotony. It reacts to situations by varying its emotional and dynamic responses. Looking more broadly at the phenomenon, agogics is all about expression, intensity, all kinds of rallentando and accelerando, pauses, various accents and so on. Etymologically, agogics means leading, and this must be guided by conscious desires and the will.

Agogics are manifested through tempo rubato, but this term denotes a deviation of broader scope in the metrorhythmic and tempo sphere of performance. The English musicologist Erwin Stein even recommends a special term to highlight this very important means of expression—rubato obbligato (“mandatory” rubato).Footnote 1 “[…] The Italian tempo—from the Latin tempus—did not mean tempo at all, but the length of the note, and the essence of tempo rubato was that, in the process of performance, part of the duration of some notes was removed in favour of others. Meanwhile, the overall time for the sounding of the phrase remained the same (this is probably what Pier F. Tosi had in mind when he wrote about a ‘glorious theft’ and its ‘restitution’).”Footnote 2

The popularity and imperative of rubato in performance are evidenced by the number of designations of a rubato character, such as abbandonamente—with satisfaction, surrendering to feeling, a capriccio—in a capricious style, freely, ad libitum—according to desire, at one’s discretion, a suo comodo—at one’s convenience, flessibile—flexibly, con alcuna licenza—with some freedom, irresoluto—wavering, senza rigore (di tempo)—without strict time, and tempo perduto—lost time.

The process of rubato is characterised by several agogic aspects:

  1. 1.

    The function of supporting points of the bar. Proper support offers dynamism, lightness, persuasiveness. This Baroque manner, if it had been adhered to, would have remained the basis of future performance tradition. Unfortunately, this tradition died out, yielding to the non-hierarchical organisation of material, due to lack of knowledge of how to maintain that correct practice.

  2. 2.

    The hierarchical sounding of the notes in the structures. Long notes are made heavier, smaller ones lighter. The style of forming a sound flow of even intensity and weight now prevailed.

  3. 3.

    The grouping of the notes determined also a particular articulation. The first part of a slurred structure, when emphasised, was seemingly lengthened, taking part of the time from the subsequent parts.

  4. 4.

    When playing legato, the common rules of articulation were also followed.

  5. 5.

    Articulational pauses—“articulational silence”—directly related to rhetoric, in which pauses, and the order of words and sentences, are important. “Silence creates anticipation, a sense that something is about to happen. […] The essential thing is the contrast between a little and a lot.”Footnote 3 In music, this means that one does not need to hold the notes for as long as the notation suggests. The notes must not appear to be stuck to one another. One should feel the difference between the continuing notes and those which are called detached. The continuing note assumes a longer part of its value, while the silence is correspondingly short, though the time of the note and the silence are the same.

  6. 6.

    In Baroque music the notes are played unevenly. That is incidentally a principle of the articulation not only of Baroque but of all music. The even nature of playing did not arise from practice but from the signs of the notes, which never registered and cannot register the psychological-intonational parameters of the musical process. In the twentieth century the triumph of the score, the fixing of complex rhythms, usually without any psychological subtext, fetishised what was written down, shackled the musician and began to apply to every type of music. As a result, the manner of Baroque articulation too was lost.

Thus, the culture of the organisation of musical language which developed in the Baroque era was forgotten in the post-Baroque period, until the middle of the twentieth century, when there was a renaissance of approaches towards the interpretation of early music (especially Baroque). Efforts were made to overcome the pseudo-Romantic crust which had formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The most ardent proponents of such a practice argued that everything was in the notes—you only had to be able to read them. But musicians fell out of the habit of reading them intelligently; they did not know how to hear what was written. They also had less to do with books which discuss how one should behave, or what values should underpin one’s activity for it to be meaningful—since understanding is the transition from the given to meaning, and not merely the conversion into sound of the given (the signs on the surface), which does not afford access to what is symbolised by the signs.

Until around 1800, musical expression followed Baroque ideas with a focus on speech. The influence of rhetoric on musical expression is not disputed. The parallelism between music and speech was called the language of sounds (Sprache in Tönen). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries musical articulation was not a problematic issue. Musicians knew the correct rules of “pronunciation.” Thus, publications were printed without articulatory signs, and often even without dynamic signs, because it was known what had to be done and how. This served to emphasise that the performer was free, because they knew how to articulate the text of the work in their own way. When composers required some special articulation, some signs or words were used—for example, in terms of signs, a dot, horizontal or vertical strokes, wavy lines (Wellenlinien), or ligatures; and in terms of words, spiccato, staccato, legato, tenuto, sostenuto or other words which indicated the required manner of performance. These articulatory signs remained consistently the same even after 1800, although their meaning often changed substantially. Baroque principles of expression were, however, discarded when Felix Mendelssohn revived the music of J. S. Bach after many years of neglect. Romanticism was vibrant and strong at the time, and no one felt obliged to perform the works of J. S. Bach or others from previous centuries in the spirit they dictated. Moreover, “an attempt was made to ‘purify’ the Baroque compositions, which were generally regarded as ‘bewigged’ and old-fashioned, and to render them in keeping with the modern Romantic style.”Footnote 4 People had forgotten how every work, not just the works of the past, had its own unique characteristics. For that reason, “[W]e must approach the great masterpieces by pushing aside the lush growth of traditional experience […], and once again begin from the beginning.”Footnote 5 J. S. Bach legitimised the principle of the “language of sounds” (Klangrede) to the highest degree. Bach probably consciously designed his works on the basis of rhetoric, and the “language of sounds” was for him the only form of music.Footnote 6 Nikolaus Harnoncourt also uses the analogy with language to explain the principles of performers’ expressiveness. He encourages the study of the musical grammar of the early period. As with a language, we must learn not only the words but also their pronunciation, their order in sentences, their semantic articulation and the dynamic hierarchy in their structures. All this applies equally to the musical language of sounds.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the hierarchical principle in music was accorded great importance. In a simple 4/4 beat, we have “good” and “bad” (nobiles and viles) sounds. So, there is the noble one, the bad two, the not so noble three and the very poor four. Obviously “noble” and “ignoble” are only epithets. They simply concern the stress. The system of stressing, like a kind of linear curve with a hierarchy of stresses, is one of the cornerstones of Baroque music. This hierarchy can be extended and applied to groups of bars, a period, a section of a work, or the whole work. In this way the works acquire the structure of clearly recognisable points of tension and release. This is true also for groups of eighth and sixteenth notes and for passages. The result is a complex structure made up of hierarchies, in which the same principle of order prevails. Well-articulated music is heard in a different way to music which is played in a plain, flat way. It affects our physical senses, influences our perception of the musical process, and engages our spirit in active, dialogised listening. There is a clear analogy here with the persuasive, well-articulated, meaningful and emotional speech of an orator.

A word about dynamics: When thinking about interpretation, every musician also considers the dynamic plan dictated by intonation. In Baroque music, the approach to dynamics was of secondary importance. In that period, dynamics was language. It was rather mini-dynamics, which occurs in individual syllables and words, and in instrumental music, even in the smallest structural units: intervals and motifs. In the Baroque period, it was not simply dynamics, but articulation—pronunciation with intonated sounds following the laws of musical speech (Klangrede) (articulation is the expression of understanding).

With respect to articulation, the approach to the concept of dotted rhythm is very important. We are naturally resistant to every precise stress of dotted rhythm. In Baroque tradition, the length of a long note, and the shortness of a short note, depended on the character and intonational basis of the work. The way in which we perform dotted rhythm today, by reproducing precisely the values of the written notes, where we hold the dotted notes exactly three times longer than the subsequent short notes, is often completely wrong from an intonational perspective.

The French dotted style deeply influenced Bach and Handel, who created magnificent overtures. This style brought its own particular way of playing. The dotted note had to be played as if it had two dots instead of one. The length of the following note had to be shortened in such a way that it was played very close to the note coming after it. This way of playing the stile francese was rigorously observed at the time of Bach and Handel. It slackened off, little by little, toward the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 7

In the nineteenth century the shortening of the note after the dot was completely rejected.

Busoni said in his edition of The Well-Tempered Clavier, apropos of the D major Fugue from Book I: “Take care not to play the dotted note too long or the sixteenth-note too short—mistakes to which teachers’ ears have long since grown accustomed”. […] It is thus that my revered master Michalowski taught it to me. According to him, the prolongation of the dot brought vulgarity to the phrase. Oh, the puerility of esthetics! That which from Lully to Bach was proud, chivalrous, and magnificent became vulgar in the nineteenth century.Footnote 8

It is more difficult to register the spirit in writing than the letters (signs), since it is impossible graphically to express the desired relationship.

The nuances of sound cannot be inscribed in the visual space. […] All kinds of sound nuances say more than can be written down.Footnote 9

Over the last fifty years, or perhaps more, due to the influence of modern music, we have held a fascination, which is dangerous (and harmful to the spirit of music), for the “accurate” reproduction of what is written down. Our preoccupation with the text alone has meant we have forgotten or completely lost (we may not have even known) those good traditions which could still provide us with a correct explanation of the written text. The idea of simply reproducing the notes has “erased” the idea of reproducing the work, and this approach is wrongly described as fidelity to the work. The goal of this effort is still to reproduce the text, and not the work, because the text and the work are different things (more about this in a separate chapter). True fidelity to the work obliges the interpreter to acquire the powers (both mental and technical) to enable the work’s meaning to emerge, its individual aesthetic to be expressed and its sounds to be shaped in an appropriate way—and that purpose is served by articulation.