What does the marcato sign ^ mean to you as a composer/arranger/engraver/etc? When would you choose it over an accent >, staccato accent or similar? I’m asking this question due to going back and editing/revising/trying to complete some old scores of mine.
The sign ^ is of somewhat obscure origin but has been in use since the early 19th century at least. I’m not entirely sure when or how it became standardized—the accent sign > was introduced by Haydn as far as I’m aware, the ^ was a very infrequent substitute (for example in Diabelli’s Vaterländischer Künstlerverein Leopold Czapek exclusively uses ^ and Carl Czerny uses both ^ and >, while all other composers only use >; Diabelli also uses both ^ and > in other original works). In Czerny’s piano school he claims ^ and > are interchangeable; that said, the ^ sign abruptly becomes almost universal alongside > around 1830 in music by Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt et al. from their earliest works, after being quite rare in the 1820s, 1810s, etc.
I’m not sure exactly when ^ started to signify a louder accent than >, but this is usually the case by the late 19th century. Also at some point (probably also during the 19th century) ^ was adopted in the string literature to indicate martelé. In the 20th century, jazz musicians adopted ^ to mean something closer to an accented staccato or at any rate a shorter attack, whereas > doesn’t have this connotation. Finally I’m pretty sure at least some of the brass repertoire uses ^ to mean cuivré.
Eventually we hit the composers who overuse the marcato sign: Mahler would put them on every note; Sorabji used them often enough that he appropriated the down-bow mark to indicate an especially strong accent; and by the late 20th/early 21st centuries we reach Xenakis with two accents/marcatos stacked on top of one another (>> and ^^), and, not to be outdone, Ligeti stacking three, four and five accents/marcatos—both composers using > and ^ more or less interchangeably. There are also some composers who stack a marcato sign on top of an accent (e.g. Langgaard, Watkins), although I’m not clear on how that should be played.
Nowadays, notation software probably plays some role in standardizing the usage of these signs; Finale/Sibelius/Dorico all interpret a ^ as louder than a > while considering them both to be the same length. So I imagine that’s become the mainstream interpretation just by default.
I didn’t know any of the above until doing some research today. For me I write music quite intuitively and thus can’t recall ever consciously thinking about whether to write > or ^, but looking thru my old work I almost entirely use > and the staccato accent, with ^ being very rare. I usually seem to put ^ over sustained notes that I don’t want shortened (also with some implications of “heavy” and “in the foreground”); should probably make that more clear in case any jazz musicians/string players/brass players/etc have a different interpretation.
Hopefully I’m not the only person here who thinks this much about notation…
