Are there any situations when one needs to make a distinction between slurs and ties?

Question

In the comment section to a question about notating tied notes, the discussion of whether it's necessary to make a distinction between ties and slurs came up.

The reasoning goes as follows: If one would place a slur underneath two consecutive notes with the same pitch, wouldn't the most reasonable thing to do be to just play/sing one single note (meaning that the slur effectively would be reduced down to a tie)? Or would this depend on the type of instrument being used (maybe for some instruments, it would make sense to produce a sort of pulsating sound) and/or the number of voices on the same staff?

Edit: Many seems to think that I'm asking what slurs and ties are. This is not the case. I'm simply asking whether it's really necessary to have two different symbols and if one simply couldn't make do with just one, which then always is unambiguously interpreted to either a tie or a slur depending on the context.

As an analogy, you could either use the words "bachelor" (tie) and "bachelorette" (slur), or you could just use the word "unmarried" and then amend it to a man ("bachelor") or a woman ("bachelorette").

Answer 1

Two tied notes on a percussive instrument (including piano) have a single attack. Two slurred notes are two strikes without dampening the first strike before placing the second between.

Two tied notes on a string instrument are a single note and thus are played on the same string. In contrast, two slurred notes may well occur on different strings when using appropriate fingering. The Ciaconne from the violin solo partita 2 of Bach has close to its end a passage with slurred note pairs from adjacent strings and very obviously you won't suddenly turn a two-string slur into a single-string tie just because two notes happen to coincide.

Answer 2

Ties change ONLY the RHYTHM value: notes which cannot be represented only by one symbol, must be tied. Ties can be only between two tones of the same pitch.

Slurs is an EXPRESSION: it indicates that a phrase should be played smoothly. It can connect two or more tones.

Answer 3

Judging from the linked question, such confusion probably involves situation when a slur only involves 2 notes, and those 2 notes are equal. Thus question arises: whether such slur is equivalent to a tie. The answer is absolutely no. There would be ways for performer to tell their difference, even when composer doesn't explicitly notate as such. Using Beethoven's 31st piano sonata as example:

Here the desired effect is grouping every two notes together, maining the legato of first note as much as possible but not as a tie (100% of note length). The effective playing would be similar to (though a bit exaggerated):

This is usually the case for 18th century keyboard music. For other instruments or vocal music, there would be other semantic meanings for slur as well, which has completely different meaning from tie. They look very similar visually, but it's the meaning that matters.

Answer 4

Ties are ALWAYS between notes at the same pitch. Either because there is no one note that will portray the length or because the long note is longer than the bar length for the piece.

Slurs are ALWAYS between notes of different pitch - two, three or more may feature. A slur could be construed as a mini-phrase, where all the notes included in the slur are played in one breath, or legato, or without a perceivable break.

Ties are always written head to head, whereas slurs can be written tail to head/ head to tail, as they include different notes, often a couple, but occasionally five or six.

The two terms are not interchangeable, and shouldn't easily get mixed up. A phrase mark, which may look similar, will ALWAYS involve notes of different pitch, so would appear similar to a slur.

Answer 5

One very important situation where you need to be completely clear whether it's a slur or a tie is when inputting to a computer notation program - particularly if you want playback. The two are logically quite different, and are entered using different commands. And they can have subtly different visual styles.

But that apart, I defy anyone to tell whether a handwritten line is a slur, tie or phrase mark other than by context. And context will be sufficient.

Answer 6

This largely depends on the context of what is being written. Performers can usually determine what is being intended by what isn't written as well. If a composer truly wants a sustained note while others above play moving notes, the simplest answer would be to write a longer duration note.

A written slur in most orchestral music, in a place that would be more easily written as a longer duration note, often means that other players have other notes being played to create harmonic motion. In these circumstances, each of the notes would be played with a distinct articulation since they are parts of a different chord, so would have both different tuning tendencies, and would also probably be intended to played with the same rhythm of the other players within that chord. If this was not the intent, and provided otherwise homogenous rhythmic motion, it would be much simpler and clearer just to write a longer note.

Ties on the other hand, are used when the rhythm would be difficult to notate otherwise, such as across barlines or on weak beats within a measure. In such a case, if musicians have the same tied rhythm, it would be safer to assume that it would not be a slur, but a tie for the sake of writing a difficult rhythm.