Vocalizing Articulation Options

One of the things that all the teachers that I ever had in Jazz Arrangement were telling me is to sing the phrases that I was currently writing with different articulation approaches (changing which notes are short, which ones are long and which ones are accented) to find the articulation pattern that felt most idiomatic and stylistically correct and then write the articulations accordingly. The differences can be drastic when you write things for instance for Big Band and two different ways of articulation can create two fundamentally different ways of how a line feels.

At first I was really reluctant doing this as I felt to me like being a nutty composer sitting in his office singing phrases to himself but once I started doing this, I still felt weird but it really helped to shape the music. Just the process of "articulating" a phrase through singing gives you a clearer idea of it than just imagining it in your head.

Interestingly, I never heard that advice in any "classical" composition classes but I felt that it would be similarly beneficial so I also started to use it when I wrote "non-Jazz".

One of my personal pet peeves are musical cues where you can clearly hear that the composer was too lazy to program in articulation changes and prefered to just keep the staccato articulation going through even though the line that they wrote doesn't really justify it.

It can make music so much livelier to just work with different articulations and especially in ostinatos, this can make a huge difference. So just singing through a few options where you alternate between different versions of articulations can make a static ostinato into an exciting musical gesture. In many cases, it helps to even just change articulations for one or a few notes to completely change the way a line feels. And while this of course is more cumbersome to program (or notate), it really is worth the extra struggle.

Making a habit of double checking the articulation options that you have for a line and singing the options to yourself will also develop your inner ear so that at one point, you don't need to sing to yourself anymore. But in any case, it is always worth investing some time into articulation decisions and not just slap a static articulation on all the notes.