Klarinet Archive - Posting 000151.txt from 1995/02

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Jonathan Cohler's long message on vibrato
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 17:20:06 -0500

I printed Jonathan's message out and carried it around for a few days
to think about it and to be able to reread it on several occasions.
I felt (and feel) it to be too important a statement to respond
with a shot from the hip so I delayed and delayed responding until
until I was sure what it was I wanted to say.

While the topic was, ostensibly, vibrato, I felt the most class
aspect of his posting was its much broader perspective on a variety
of things having to do with the clarinet and clarinet playing.

What I got out of it was a general support for my belief (spoken of
many times on this list) that clarinet playing (or should I say the
performance of music in general) is very subjective. As such, most
of us presume that when we stop playing and start talking about the
things we do on clarinet, it is OK to continue to be subjective.
When our playing is emotional, so is our talk emotional. So we
all have a tendency to talk emotionally and try to pass it off how
we do things as both fact and the only way to do them.

Nowhere is this more true than with respect to vibrato but the
attitude is not limited to that. It is also true in performance
practice, and original instrument performances, and theories on
wood (and its behaviorial characteristics). So when one teacher
or player does not like vibrato (for whatever reason), then that
player says that vibrato is bad and should not be done, and vice
versa.

As players we are terrific people, but when we act as part of the
dialogue to help advance the state of the art, we sort of fall
apart into a lot of fairy stories and old wives tales.

The use of vibrato in Mozart is very illustrative: at least a half
dozen people made very strong statements against that activity but
I don't remember any of them saying why they felt that way. Jonathan
suggests the contrary and points to Charlie Neidich as having some
kind of evidence that Stadler did it all the time. I'd very much
like to see what Charlie has to say on that topic because I have been
looking for years to find some statement about vibrato on any wind
instrument in music of the 18th century. So far I have never been
successful at finding any. But in the absence of any information,
I can easily come to the conclusion that it was encouraged because
everything that was discouraged in the 18th century was invariably
spelled out somewhere. Things that were encouraged or expected
were simply not spoken of. You went to the theater and heard the
things that you were expected to do, and vibrato was probably one
of them. But I don't know this for sure.

Other feels so strongly (and protectively) about the music of Mozart
that they would to add nothing to the notes and that includes
trembling on them (i.e., vibrato), improvising on them, or even
altering them when new evidence comes to light (such as K. 622
where some of what we play, in terms of actual notes, is just plain
wrong. It is like embalming a work permanently, never to be changed,
never to be restudied, never to be altered in any way beyond that
of an epoch's perspective.

All of this is by way of saying that Jonathan's document was
extraordinarily impressive and, though he may not have meant it to do
so, touched on things far beyond issues of vibrato.

I don't know when I have enjoyed a posting more than his.

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