Klarinet Archive - Posting 000087.txt from 1994/02

From: "Robert E. Winston" <usr4818a@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Vibrato
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 04:12:25 -0500

> do you have a better understanding of the enormous rift that
> existed ca. 1950 between the very, very few who played with a
> vibrato, and the very, very many who were simply unwilling to
> tolerate anyone (particularly Kell) who used one.

> There is so much of that in the clarinet playing world: an
> attitude of only one way to do something, that person's way.

That's part of it, of course. "We've always done it this way so it must be
the right way." (And don't _you_ want to play the right way?) But it's not
the whole story.

For a long time, I couldn't understand the almost universal aversion to
vibrato amongst clarinet teachers when I was learning the instrument back
in the sixties. These classically trained musicians didn't have a problem
with vibrato per se. The vibrato of their string playing colleagues was not
an issue, but vibrato on the clarinet was. In my youthful ignorance, I
could see no reason we should be denied this useful tool.

It was finally explained to me - unintentionally - by my teacher, a
symphony player of some note.

> the incredible fuss that was made when Kell first came to the
> US, ca. 1948.

At that time, vibrato on the clarinet was associated with big band music -
with Artie Shaw and Woody Herman. Left unspoken (mostly) was the
understanding the big band was a white derivative of black music - Jazz.
And that is what disturbed people about clarinet vibrato.

Jazz, my teacher explained, was the institutionalization (yes, he actually
used that word) of bad music. The rhythms, the intonation, of Jazz
originated with uneducated "colored" musicians playing badly on bad
instruments.

Over time, he explained, this bad playing had become the accepted norm and
had even been copied by white Jazz players who didn't understand its
origin.

Even "colored" musicians who could afford good instruments played this way
out of ignorance, he said.

It's not that vibrato can't be overdone or done badly - of course it can.
But that doesn't explain the revulsion to any vibrato, no matter how well
played, by most clarinetists in the 1950's and '60's.

The reference to 1948 is what brought all this back to mind. In '48 Woody
Herman was tossed out of a hotel gig here in Cincinnati and run out of town
for playing "that damn nigger music".

I think that's what all the fuss was really about. White classical
musicians, playing white European music, in their all white orchestras to
lily white audiences were repulsed by the association with "nigger music".

________
Robert E. Winston usr4818a@-----.edu