What is the (visual) difference between spiccato and staccatissimo?

[rpatters1]

I am struggling to know what to map to spiccato markings vs. staccatissimo markings. Since no SMuFL glyphname contains the word spiccato, I am wondering if it is appropriate to even have the distinction.

The marking documentation really needs visual examples of each marking as well as suggested SMuFL glyphnames that might map to them.

[adrianholovaty]

Have a look at the MusicXML docs for examples of both:

https://w3c.github.io/musicxml/musicxml-reference/elements/spiccato/
https://w3c.github.io/musicxml/musicxml-reference/elements/staccatissimo/

Definitely a subtle distinction visually! And yes, we definitely need to add some visual examples to the MNX docs.

[rpatters1]

This is where the terminology gets weird. The image at the link for "spiccato" is a set of glyphs called "staccatissimo" in SMuFL. The image at the link for "staccatissimo" is a set of glyphs called "staccatissimoWedge".

I find this very confusing, and I wonder if MNX shouldn't conform to SMuFL terminology. At the very least, some explanation is required in the docs.

[mscuthbert]

Let's see what experts are saying:

New Grove 2 (2001)

Spiccato (It.).
In modern string playing, a short, off-the-string bow stroke. The term is sometimes synonymous with the bouncing stroke [Sautillé]. Before 1750, however, ‘spiccato’ and ‘staccato’ were regarded as equivalent terms (in, for example, Brossard's Dictionaire, 1703, and Corrette's L'École d'Orphée, 1738) meaning simply detached or separated as opposed to legato.
See [Bow, §II, 2(vii) and 3(viii)].
DAVID D. BOYDEN/PETER WALLS

Sautillé
(Fr.; Ger. Springbogen; It. saltando, saltato).
A bowstroke played rapidly in the middle of the bow, one bowstroke per note, so that the bow bounces very slightly off the string of its own accord. It is not indicated in any consistent manner: sometimes dots are placed above or below the notes, sometimes arrow-head strokes, and sometimes the stroke is simply left to the performer's discretion. ‘Spiccato’ and ‘sautillé’ are sometimes used as synonyms, though [Spiccato] tends to be applied to a broader range of off-the-string strokes. See [Bow, §II, 3].
DAVID D. BOYDEN/PETER WALLS

Staccato
(It.: ‘detached’).
Of an individual note in performance, usually separated from its neighbours by a silence of articulation. The separation may be, but is not invariably, accompanied by some degree of emphasis, and occasionally the term may imply emphasis without physical separation. The term may be regarded as the antonym of [Legato]; a degree of articulation intermediate between staccato and legato, which has sometimes been represented by the term ‘non legato’, was regarded by certain 18th-century authorities as the normal method of playing melodies with life (according to C.P.E. Bach in his Versuch, 1753, it implied playing with ‘fire and a slight accentuation’). It is not always clear, however, that the use of the term ‘non-legato’ implies something different from staccato marks; in late Beethoven, for instance, the use of the term ‘non-legato’ or staccato marks, often occurring after legato passages, may both merely be intended as indications not to slur.

In 20th-century notation the staccato is generally prescribed by means of a dot over or under the note and is distinguished from the more emphatic staccatissimo, indicated by a wedge. Furthermore, modern notation often prescribes the technical means to be adopted by the performer in order to secure the required effect. String playing is particularly rich in such distinctions: for example, there is a difference between a staccato in which the bow remains on the string (with or without a change of bow direction for each note) and the [Sautillé] and spiccato in which the bow leaves the string between each pair of notes. Such technical distinctions gradually came into use from the 18th century; for details, see [Bow, §II, 2(iv, vii) and 3(vi–ix)].

Before the second half of the 19th century, dots, dashes and wedges were likely to have the same meaning, although some notators and theorists distinguished between dots and dashes, meaning different degrees of staccato, at least from the time of Quantz (Versuch, 1752) and Leopold Mozart (Violinschule, 1756), and it was generally expected in the 18th century that performers would make use of a variety of different touches. [...]

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a wide variety of signs came to be used to signify various nuances of staccato articulation involving numerous combinations of dots, vertical and horizontal dashes, vertical and horizontal wedges etc., in the music of such composers as Debussy and Schoenberg. Attempts have been made since then to standardize this aspect of notation, but without general success.
GEOFFREY CHEW/CLIVE BROWN

Articulation Marks
CLIVE BROWN

6. Increasing Systemization

From the late 18th century an increasing number of authorities advocated or acknowledged two signs, the dot and the stroke, for staccato on unslurred notes. But there was still no general agreement about precisely what these should signify. The majority of late 18th- and early 19th-century German authors who described both signs favoured the stroke as the sharper (‘schärfer’) of the two [...] ''[ed. -- a note about some composers, such as Schubert intending the opposite: stroke as longer staccato]''

The principal disagreements at this stage were between string players and keyboard players, and between composers in the German and French traditions. In string playing different forms of staccato mark became increasingly linked to specific types of bowing (martelé, spiccato etc.) and, partly because of the varying practices of French and German violinists, these signs acquired conflicting meanings in the two traditions. For Baillot strokes were associated with martelé and dots with sautillé or spiccato, while for Ferdinand David the reverse was the case. Thus German musicians continued to associate the stroke with accented staccato and the dot with lighter staccato, while the French appear, on the whole, to have associated the stroke with a shorter and usually lighter staccato and the dot with a less short and weightier staccato. Although the definition of the shortening effect of staccato marks propounded in J.L. Adam’s Méthode du piano du Conservatoire of 1804, whereby a stroke shortened the note by three quarters, a dot by half and a dot under a slur by one quarter, was repeated in German, English, Italian and other theory books during the 19th century, it cannot be regarded as a reliable guide to the practices of many composers of the period. In any case, as many theorists continued to point out, the degree and type of articulation applied in particular cases was conditioned by many external factors, such as the size of the ensemble, the qualities of the instrument, or the space in which the performance took place.

The ambiguity in the meaning of staccato marks, particularly the question of whether they carried any implications of accent, induced some late 18th- and early 19th-century theorists, for instance Türk and Corri, to propose other symbols to indicate articulation, but these signs remained confined largely to the realm of theory. Interestingly, the uncertainty over the meaning of staccato dots and strokes was still sufficiently strong in the early 20th century for Schoenberg to consider it necessary to explain in the preface to his Serenade op.24 that wedges indicated ‘hard, heavy, staccatoed’ notes and dots ‘light, elastic, thrown (spiccato) ones’.

So...what?

I think that if we were designing SMuFL today (er, if I were) then I'd suggest that we would name the two "wedge" and "curvedWedge" and not try to indicate which one goes with what. But in MNX (which is not too late to change easily), as a semantics-first system, we should use spiccato and staccatissimo with a symbol attribute defining which of the two is meant. (It's probably much too late to update MusicXML to conform to the semantics over visual aspect of this).

I also believe in encoding ambiguity where I would have a third articulation "wedge" which indicates it is unclear whether spiccato or staccatissimo is intended, only that its symbol is either curvedWedge or wedge -- which is probably what I'd default to importing music as. But I think this view isn't generally supported.

[rpatters1]

As a practical matter, MNX seems to be about notation. "Spiccato" is a bowing technique applicable to string players, but the marking (i.e., the notation) that (frequently) indicates it can also be used on non-string parts. How a player technically performs a given notation seems to me to be beyond the scope of MNX, but that's what spiccato seems to be attempting to specify here.