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Re: A small exercise

Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2006-06-13 16:18

beejay wrote:

>> I suspect that our 18th century predecessors had a much greater range of articulation techniques than we do. Perhaps they didn't do flutter tonguing or circular breathing, but they had chest and throat as well as tongue articulation.>>

I suppose this belongs in the other thread, and I'd say 'diaphragm' instead of 'chest'; but in fact WE have those too -- they're just not commonly thought of as being applied to faster articulations.

Consider: you can, without compromising your abdominal blowing effort, modulate a sequence of quarter-notes so that each has a diminuendo shape, using the diaphragm opposition described in the 'support' thread. (Remember, you seem to be 'doing nothing' as this occurs -- the diminuendos are 'magic', in the terminology of that thread.)

Then, you can 'feather off' the end of each of those notes with a very light tongue action, producing a sequence of shaped, detached quarters. Your abdominal flexion remains the same -- you're still blowing, constantly.

Increasing speed gradually yields a light staccato.

It's not something that you often do at speed (though it's easier than you might think) -- but then, at speed, a gentle tongue stroke mimics a diminuendo in any case.

>> In the earlier thread, we noted the ambiguities in Mozart scores between dots and strokes. It is almost as if this ambiguity expresses a misty area between legato and staccato.>>

I had my own response to the dot/dash distinction, as you probably noticed -- but actually, it fits in with what you write here. Classical phrases are modulated -- 'shaped' -- by diaphragm and mouth variations, and a note under a dash, as 'a degenerate phrase' is similarly shaped rather than being simply cut off.

>> The machine-gun delivery of long passages of detached notes may impress at first but it quickly wears out its welcome. But how does one achieve the light articulation that was said to be typical of 18th-century Viennese playing?>>

I'd say as above.

Of course, the lighter reed responds faster, so it's a bit easier to do.

>> I suspect the answer can be found in Tony's suggestion that notes should be grouped in the same way that syllables are grouped in speech. But this demands a very deep understanding, and not just technical, of the music, and unfortunately, we cannot all be musicologists.>>

I think this is a bit pessimistic:-) Notes ARE grouped together in larger structures, sometimes notated, sometimes not. And part of the reason why we all respond to music is that we have a good sense that some notes are more important than others, and that this distinction helps create those groupings.

What we respond to is how the music 'speaks'. There's no reason that we can't learn to speak it ourselves.

Tony

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