Klarinet Archive - Posting 000637.txt from 1998/01
From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: Apologies to Michael Whight - Re: Vibrato (Redux)
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 19:20:22 -0500
I thought I was sending a private message to Michael and it went out
to the world. My apologies. It was my intent to create a less
dogmatic posting for KLARINET but that is now water under the
bridge.
In a separate posting, and not to me, Michael asked a particular
member (I'm paraphrasing) why he felt that vibrato in music of
the classic period served a useful purpose.
Presuming that for once in my life I got the message right instead
of starting in the middle and reading towards both edges at once,
that is a question to which I wish to give a very personal answer.
Of all the emotions that all of music attempts to simulate, passion
is the one that appears to me to be the most frequently used.
One hears comedy, one hears high class hootchie-kootchie music, one
hears treachery, one hears statements of high moral tone, and, of
course one hears a great deal of man-woman love, some of it so
musically explicit that it can be embarassing in public.
Now what act of a human is most closely associated with conjugal
love? Answer (in my opinion): trembling; i.e., one trembles
with passion, one trembles with love, one trembles with jealousy.
In effect, trembling is the single most used term to describe the
array of emotions that can occur in a man/woman relationship.
And in music the most picturesque way to duplicate or simulate
that phenomenon is with vibrato, and that is because it causes
the music to tremble, LITERALLY!
In examining a variety of vocal tutors from Italy, the first from
1710 and then going forward from there, shows that at no time in
the history of Italian vocal schooling was a vibrato considered
anything other than the most essential element of vocal production.
In some schools they first spoke of vibrato before they spoke of
vocal production.
Now it is very hard to think that a practice as fundamental as that
in Italy would somehow hold no sway over the rest of Europe,
particularly Austria which always considered Italian art the
most important. That Mozart wrote Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi,
Idomeneo, etc. in Italian in a German speaking country shows the
sway that the language and the culture had over artistic Austria.
Consequently it defies logic to suggest that the technique would
have been deliberately abandoned (or ignored or struck down as
a mechanism to be used) in the very country that so used every
other Italian art form it could lay its hands on for a class of
instruments. No one debates that vibrato was not used for strings.
It's clarinets that are presumed exempt, and for no reason that I
can think of (well that's not really true, I can think of reasons).
I think that the problem lies elsewhere. With Mendelssohn and
later, the classic era (and that means Mozart, Mozart, and Mozart)
was so idealized that they wanted to eliminate the conjugal/sexual
aspects of the music from that period, particularly in England
which was a Victorian nation even before Victoria was born.
To play Mozart with passion would have been considered a sin.
You want passion? Play Wagner. You want virginity? Play
Mozart.
And that means dropping all of the elements of performance practice
that gave the music its passion; i.e., improvisation, ornamentation,
and vibrato, or three things that we just don't do very well today.
The fact that Mozart wrote poems such as:
At night, of farts there is no lack
That are let off like a powerful crack;
The king of farts came yesterday,
Whose farts smelled sweeter than the May...
was hidden,with only scholars permitted to see the text of his
"indecent" letters, whereas the sexual liberties of Chopin,
Liszt, Wagner were considered appropriate because these were
passionate men. Even their excesses were excused because "that
is the way of today's artists."
But not Mozart. He was a virgin and tinkly. Do you not think
that Mozart was a passionate individual? That his music smoulders
with sexual overtones (and undertones, too)? That he was as horny
as a bull in heat? He was indeed.
And the heritage of that kind of thinking (which I admit is somewhat
exaggerated but it was only to make my case more sillhouetted) has
brought us to the point where reasonable men and women argue today
about whether or not vibrato was even a part of the classical
vocabulary.
We have so idealized all music of this epoch that we treat it
like one big china doll. You got to get down and dirty when
you play Mozart, and vibrato is an important tool that allows
one to do that.
And if someone cannot play K. 622, second movement, without causing
my heart to burst (not literally, please, I've been there before),
then you are probably a lousy lover and should take lessons on the
art of making love. Only when you play that movement and leave the
audience awestruck at your passion (part of which was created through
your mastery of vibrato) have you reached the 6th degree of black belt
horniness.
Is that word-picture clear?
=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================
