Today as part of my IDS project, I continued with a song I was previously working on, and used articulations like staccatos and legatos to great effect.

Many people consider music at its base to be simply a series of different pitched sounds played at different times and durations to create melodic progressions; this could not be further for the truth. Any good composer knows that what you play isn’t nearly as important as how you play it.

And it’s something I discovered when I pressed play on my project in Sibelius, and realized how awful my music sounded.

The thing is, when I created the initial concept of the song on my keyboard, I played it with staccatos, tenutos, legatos, and the works, without even realizing it. However, hearing my music played back with no articulation, every note sounded completely the same; flat, and boring.

But with a few well placed articulation marks, I was able to transform it from complete garbage to a full representation of what I had imagined.

(This post is part of a series of entries into my Learning Journey for my IDS project in Music Composition.)

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