Klarinet Archive - Posting 000929.txt from 2000/09

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl]More about espressivo
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 20:10:49 -0400

Bill Wright wrote,
> This morning I happened to listen to a CD of harpsichord recordings,
>and I noticed that the dynamic was unchanging. I've never been close to
>a harpsichord, but my memory is that a harpsichord has only one loudness
>and only one attack and only one articulation?
> ....anyway, it was interesting to pay attention to what happens to
>music if the only sources of expression are pitch and note duration.
>The result is not all 'bad'.

Apparently a student (later a famous soloist) was studying a score while
sitting on the floor in a hallway at Juilliard (or Curtis, or...?), when a
teacher came along, bent down and pointed to the music. "You see those little
black marks? Those are the notes." He waggled his fingers. "See those
empty spaces? That's the music." That anecdote has been attributed to so
many different teachers and students that I can't attribute it, but IMHO, the
basic validity of it is more true on harpsichord than on any other instrument.

A lot of people will swear they hear crescendos and decrescendos on hpschd.
But you're right: The string is either plucked (sound) or not plucked
(silence), unlike the piano, where hammers strike strings with varying
degrees of force. On a harpsichord, it doesn't matter how hard you touch the
keys, unless you're one of those people unfondly known as a piano-breaker. I
never heard of anybody breaking a modern, steel-framed Steinway piano. A lot
of modern harpsichords are steel- framed, too, but a hpschd will break before
the strings will play any louder. When I play my electronic keyboard as a
hpschd, I set the touch for "fixed" to simulate that lack of dynamics,
because IMHO it's good to learn to use silences and rubato for expression
instead of using volume as a crutch all the time.

There is some volume control on a harpsichord, but it comes from piling on:
You can get less volume by applying a damper, or more volume by playing more
notes at once, or you can engage couplers to pluck more than one register
(set of strings) simultaneously with each key touch. The basic note, which
sounds the written pitch, comes from what's called the 8-foot register
(because the longest string on it is approximately 8 feet). Small
clavichords and harpsichords may have only one register, the 8 foot. A
concert harpsichord often has two manuals (keyboards) with couplers for two
8s, two 4s and a 16 (one set for each manual, with the bass 16 on only the
lower manual). The 4-foot register gives a pitch an octave higher, and the
16-foot register an octave lower, than the written pitch. Occasionally
someone will add a 2-foot. A few have even been built with more than two
manuals, although "Bigger is Better" isn't fashionable now because it's
anachronistic for Baroque music.

So you can get terraced dynamics by using nothing but an 8 on the top manual
and the other 8, a 4 and the 16 on the bottom keyboard, for instance, and
moving your hand(s) from one keyboard to the other, or by using a pedal board
on some big hpschds. Knee levers or foot treadles on some hpschds let you
take off coupling or put it back on between phrases, or engage or disengage
the dampers. But you can't get a gradual crescendo or decrescendo, because
the register changes are all or nothing.

I don't know if the old Westminster mono LP recordings from the mid-20th
century, of Fernando Valenti playing Scarlatti sonatas, ever came out on CD,
but if you're interested in just how much terracing is possible, he made
about the most extreme use of registration changes I ever heard. He played a
huge pedal harpsichord and made full use of all the toys on it. He recorded
over 400 of Scarlatti's sonatas (there are 600+, if you count the ones he
might have written for organ or fortepiano). IMHO he overdid the
registration changes, but he was a great player.

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~~
Young's Law: All great discoveries are made by mistakes.
Corollary: The greater the funding, the longer it takes to make the mistake.
~~~~~~~~~~~~

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