Abstract for the 1st International Conference on Historical Keyboard Music

The ICHKM Conference 1 - 3 July 2011
Music, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Mozart's double slurrings (one or more small slurs indicated within a big slur) have long been ignored. Often, due to their unfamiliarity, these unusual double slurrings were omitted or altered by scholarly-editors in Urtext editions, and many modern performers have questioned whether these markings were practicable and musical. It is highly likely that these unusual markings were genuinely Mozart's intended indications, so we need to ask what Mozart meant by indicating these double slurrings, what their role was in his music, and how practicable they were in performance.

Mozart was in fact one of the few composers at the time who applied every slur he intended in his music and he tended not to omit slurs, especially from the middle of the 1770s onwards. This, presumably, was to give clear performing guidance. He always wrote slurs simultaneously whilst he wrote notes; in addition, there is evidence of his altering and correcting his slurring in his autographs. For him, the slur sign was as important as his notes in the presentation of his music. The use of double slurring, though unusual in eighteenth-century notation and probably unknown to many composers and musicians, did exist as a few composers' proper notational practice. For instance, it was notably applied by Giuseppe Tartini and Leopold Mozart, and can be found in the music of Michael Haydn and Anton Cajetan Adlgasser. Mozart already marked simple double slurrings in 1778, but it was after 1781 that he used it as a device to give the more detailed performing guidance which could not normally be notated.

There was no rule as to how double slurring was applied. Once one realizes why Mozart indicated these unusual double slurrings, one will notice how inevitable each of these slurs was, how precisely Mozart wanted his ideas to be presented, and how magical these double slurrings were. They were able to convey ideas which were difficult or impossible to notate at the time!