Klarinet Archive - Posting 000222.txt from 1994/02

From: Cary Karp <nrm-karp@-----.SE>
Subj: Re: Vibrato
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 1994 08:56:48 -0500

I've taken a renewed look through the various "How to Play an Instrument
Good" books that I have, to see what's said about vibrato. It's seems
that even saxophone books mention the three kinds of vibrato as
applicable to the sax (diaphragm, throat and lip). They distinguish
between lip and jaw, usually recommending the former as the most suitable
saxophone technique and dismissing the latter as a swing-era jazz
affectation.

I also noticed that Brymer has the following to say in the 1990 edition
of his, "Clarinet" (pp 204-5): "To use or not to use vibrato? The advanced
teacher can only advise, not decide. On the face of it, this might seem
to be not only a trivial, but a ridiculous question." He then makes it
clear that he regards vibrato as an invaluable musical effect but can
understand why some people might regard it as a "blemish" on the
surface of the clarinet's "pure sound", which "more than any other
instrument . . . can depict the sort of cool flawless beauty of a marble
statue or a piece of perfectly polished wood."

He then describes several types of vibrato: jaw (pitch vibrato and okay for
jazz), lip (pitch vibrato but "less intrusive" than jaw vibrato), throat
("intensity vibrato" used by many "sophisticated clarinetists" but an
"abomination"), and:

"the purely diaphragmatic vibrato, which produces pulsations . . . by
controlled impulses from the diaphragm exactly as practiced by singers.
This is the most difficult sort of vibrato, but in some ways the best. It
has, however, the decided disadvantage of being extremely tiring, even
after it has been fully mastered, and for this reason many excellent
players use a combination of lip and diaphragm vibrato".

I have never regarded the descriptive models used by musicians as
anything other than pedagogical constructs. That is, what Brymer says here
is not a priori a statement of "scientific" fact. It would sure seem to me,
though, that he is credibly arguing that lip vibrato is not the only
such technique used by clarinetists. Although he implies that diaphragm
vibrato is a pitch modulation technique, I am still not prepared to
retract my challenge to all takers to demonstrate that it is, in fact,
anything other than a volume modulation technique.

To save a time-wasting digression, I have no interest in maintaining that
what is usually called diaphragm vibrato might not, in point of anatomical
fact, better be described in terms of the action of several sets of
abdominal muscles. Throat vibrato is several things, as is lip vibrato,
and I will stipulate that the same is in all likelihood true of diaphragm
vibrato. (This gut, throat, chops thing is starting to look like a chakra
diagram :-)