Articulation in the daily discourse of the modern musician has acquired such broad usage that its significance is often obscured. We speak of “articulating” this or that passage in a kind of catch-all manner with any variety of meanings and on any number of levels, many of which easily merge into the realm of punctuation. Take for instance the following two definitions of articulation from The New Harvard Dictionary:

Writers on the performance practice of early music (anything from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century) interpret articulation with much the same breadth: Sandra Rosenblum explains in 1988: “Articulation in performance is the delineation of motives or musical ideas by the grouping, separating, and related accenting of notes…. Through this clarification music gains shape and meaning analogous to that provided for language by punctuation and accentuation.” Donington comments in 1974 on “how extremely articulate early phrasing needs to be.” Ratner, writing in 1980, builds a definition of articulation which, in addition to slur and staccato indications, above all stresses clarity in performance, defining this as does Türk (in 1789) to include “the proper connection and separation of musical periods.” In 1985 Robin Stowell praises the efforts of the violinist Habeneck (in 1840) for his comprehensive illustration of the various techniques of “phrase articulation.”

Yet is such a comprehensive term a practical one?