Klarinet Archive - Posting 000071.txt from 1994/02

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: vibrato
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 1994 10:33:28 -0500

Martin Brown's note on vibrato was very perceptive. I think vibrato
to be quite difficult to carry off. But Martin's comments also started
the thinking process about the purpose of vibrato. Why should pitch
changes (from slow to fast) have any emotional impact whatsoever on
the performance of music. I don't disagree that it does, but I wondered
why this emotional connection should exist at all.

I find that I am unable to use a phrase such as "warmth of tone" because
I don't think of tone as warm or cold. It's just tone. So why should
one tone, played without any pitch variation whatsoever, sound more
or less appropriate (depending on the emotional nature of the music)
than one that is played with pitch variation?

First let me suggest that, to whatever extent there is romantic emotion
in music, the player wants to convey that feeling in his/her playing.
Such emotions are inherently related to tremors (or trembling) and I
suggest that vibrato is an attempt to simulate this characteristic in
our speech when emotion overcomes us.

In effect, when (and if) we turn on vibrato during a performance, we
do so partly deliberately and partly because the emotion of the moment
is best (or perhaps only) expressed by this trembling which vibrato
simulates.

Consider the slow movement of the Brahms clarinet quintet: now that is
an emotional piece full of gypsy music. There are lots of places where
one must sustain a tone over moving lines. Beyond the beauty of one's
tone at such instances - and a crescendo or decrescendo - exactly what
resources are at the clarinetist's disposal that enable him or her to
show passion, trembling, rose-in-the-teeth gypsy flair? Of course:
vibrato. This is equally true in the very first entrance of the clarinet
in the first movement of the same work. There are 6 eighth notes and then,
over a string line that is quite erotic, the clarinet player holds for
a measure and then takes off into heaven.

I find it quite difficult to project passion at these place without using
vibrato. It is a mirror of what I feel at that juncture: trembling!

Nor does the music have to be out and out erotic to cause me to tremble.
The slow movement of the Mozart quintet has such passages as does the
slow variation in the final movement.

But in playing Stockhausen, where the intellect is at work (for me) far
more than the emotion, I do not tremble passionately, and this reflects
itself in the fact that I do not use vibrato in such music.

As for the speed and magnitude of the pitch changes, it seems to me that
this is also reflected in the kind of vibrato used. Consider Giora Feidman's
recordings of klezmer music. It is breathtaking how he uses vibrato to
give greater emotionality by describing his feelings.

And this guy was the bass clarinet player with the Israel Philharmonic,
so he is very well trained. He sounds that way when he plays because
he uses vibrato as one of the tools that enable him to sound that way.

Now if string players from Bach's epoch used vibrato, if oboe players
during Haydn's period used it, if a bagpipe can use it to achieve some
level of emotional involvement, I am unable to understand what the
hell all the fuss is about when clarinet players use it.

About 20 years ago I reviewed a book for The Clarinet. In it, the author
said, "Vibrato is a sickness that should only be used by jazz clarinetists."
I was shocked by such a bigoted view and my review showed it. I just
don't understand how the use of vibrato could make people so up tight,
as they were when Kell came to America and showed us all how to do it.
Maybe the American clarinet players were just scared to death!!

====================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
(leeson@-----.edu)
====================================

   
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