Introductory notes
As we explored in the article Musicality: how to make your ocarina playing sound good, articulations allow you to separate one note from the next, and ornaments are details used for decoration, or to draw attention to some notes. Both are essential tools for creating musicality in performances.
This section teaches you how to perform the different kinds of articulation and ornamentation that ocarinas allow. Where ornaments and playing techniques have standard notations in sheet music, these have been explained. However, it is also important to note that the usage of articulation and ornamentation can be a personal thing.
Musicality is a complex topic to discuss as there is no single 'correct' way of doing it. Many musical styles do not notate articulations and ornamentation at all, assuming you intuitively know what to do. Every genre has its own stylistic goals, and the guidelines of one tradition are often the polar opposite of another.
I would recommend learning to perform the techniques discussed throughout this part of the book. Then, once you have them in muscle memory:
- listen to skilled performances of what you're learning played on a similar instrument. Slow the recording down, listen for ornaments that sound similar to the ones you can perform. Play over the recording and imitate it as closely as you can.
- look for guidance on the performance style for the genre you are playing, as numerous books and studies exist, targeting many different instruments, and which can be easily adapted to ocarina in many cases.
- Experimentally apply different articulations and oraments to your music and see what sounds good to you.
By doing these things over time, you'll gradually start to build an intuition for the use of ornamentation, combining multiple sources to develop your own style.
It is also worth being aware that notation can create a false sense of security. For new musicians, it is easy to assume that a score notates exactly how something should be performed, but it doesn't.
Even for ornaments that have a standardised notation, there's a huge range of ways they can be performed, leading to a wide range of musical effects. Within classical music for instance, the intended meaning of symbols varies between composers and also era. Also, not all musical traditions abide by standard interpretations, and may use symbols to mean different things.
Sheet music is an approximation, in the same sense that written English is. When one reads a text in their native language, they read in their own accent. Musicians do the same thing when performing from sheet music, adding details as required for the idiom they are playing.
Notation can be more or less specific with these details. Classical scores are often very specified, while folk music often sounds completely different to what the notation suggests. But on a small enough scale, there are always unspecified details.
