 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Bartmann
Date: 2008-10-21 17:30
Since I play both flute and clarinet, I often test my transposing skills by playing the same music on both instruments. This back and forth playing revealed something about clarinet vibrato.
Some music sounds fine on both instruments.
Much earlier music that is solidly centered on the treble clef sounds good on both the clarinet and flute. Once, however the music stays above c’’’ (second ledger line), transposing down an octave and a minor second sometimes can be too much effort for a Sunday afternoon.
But music written specifically for the flute by composers like Debussy or Faure doesn’t sound so good, nor would I expect it to. Also pentatonic Chinese or Native American flute music with long sustained notes sound dull on the clarinet because they really need vibrato to make the note come alive. Also Native American flute music often has a chacteristic vibrato followed by a flattening of pitch that again is impractical on the clarinet. Although I’ve tried vibrato with this type of music it sounds too Jazzy and forced.
And then, for the flute I tranposed the Brahms Sonata 120, number 2 for Piano with Clarinet accompaniment. While some of the upper register phrases sound good, the overall feeling of the piece is lost. Entire phrases that extend to the throaty depths of the Chalumeau sound anemic on the flute. And because the clarinet has a great dynamic range, the slow building of intensity that happens through the piece is lost.
But the major observation about clarinet vibrato is that it is not as flexible as flute vibrato either in speed or degree of pitch sharpening or flattening. The flute has many notes with an overall pitch tendency. So sharpening or flattening affects an entire range of notes.
So ideally, during vibrato, the note should be sharpened and flattened by an equal degree.
Because clarinet tuning is more irregular, there are odd notes that are many cents out of tune. So creating vibrato is a challenge because notes that are extremely sharp have to be first flattened to be in tune, and then flattened further to create vibrato. The same with a flat note. It must be first sharpened to bring it in tune, and then sharpened further to create vibrato.
Also to facilitate vibrato a softer reed is necessary. But a soft reed often yields a flatter pitch. So it can be very ineffective to sharpen a note that is both inherently flat, and is further flattened by a soft reed.
So to create clarinet vibrato is in general more difficult, more involved and less flexible than an instrument like the flute.
So perhaps this is why vibrato for clarinet has never really caught on for the clarinet.
Just some thoughts.
Post Edited (2008-10-22 20:48)
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Author: Sylvain
Date: 2008-10-21 19:36
Bartmann:
I may not completely agree with your post, since I have heard enough clarinet players truly mastering vibrato (e.g., Cohler, Stolzmann). Nevertheless, this is quite an interesting topic and I would love to be enlightened to the origin of not playing vibrato.
Does anyone know how/when/where the dogma that clarinetist shoudn't vibrate appeared?
--
Sylvain Bouix <sbouix@gmail.com>
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Author: mrn
Date: 2008-10-21 20:32
[Edit - I started writing this post before Tony wrote his post, so this is not a response to his post. I'm really glad to see him in this thread, though. Who better to discuss both clarinet history AND Fourier analysis with!  ]
This is a very complicated topic with no simple explanations (which is why it's interesting!). First off, there's more than one kind of vibrato, lip vibrato and diaphragm vibrato being the two I'm most familiar with.
Since studying engineering completely warped my brain, I simply can't stop myself from adding that lip vibrato is, in essence, a form of "frequency modulation" (FM--like the radio in your car), while diaphragm vibrato is essentially a form of "amplitude modulation" (AM). The interesting thing about this (which is why I bring this up) is that both AM and FM introduce new frequencies into the spectrum of the sound--that is, they change the harmonic content of the sound. (In fact, when you play MIDI files on a cheap sound card the different timbres are actually simulated using FM--like some kind of extreme robotic lip vibrato). Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we refer to both phenomena with the same name, "vibrato," because our ears/brain perceive new frequency components with both techniques, even though the quantity modulated is different.
But this raises another question: Are we clarinetists often averse to the use of clarinet vibrato because the added harmonic content "spoils" our essentially "purely odd" harmonic series? (In other words, do we start to lose the unique harmonic qualities of the clarinet's tone by tossing in vibrato? And is this why so many of us don't care for clarinet vibrato, particularly in classical playing?)
Second, from a historical standpoint, it may seem easy to say that vibrato is part of some "old school French" style and that "the German style" does not employ vibrato. Yet, there are those who would argue two of the most famous and important clarinetists in history, Richard Muhlfeld and Anton Stadler, who were German and Austrian, respectively, actually played with vibrato! If that argument is valid, can we make *any* useful generalizations at all about vibrato practice from a historical standpoint? And if so, what?
Post Edited (2008-10-22 03:50)
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2008-10-21 20:37
Mike wrote:
>> Yet, two of the most famous clarinetists in history believed to have used vibrato were German and Austrian, respectively, namely Richard Muhlfeld and Anton Stadler!>>
Source?
Tony
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Author: Sylvain
Date: 2008-10-21 21:01
Tony:
I guess I was a little radical with my statement, although for some/many teachers have a ver dogmatic approach to vibrato (and actually many other aspects of playing).
In any case, I read your articles but could not find the answer to my question. Let me clarify:
Do we know with reasonable certainty the geographical and historical origins of vibrato practice (and its non practice) in clarinet playing?
My understanding is that string vibrato in its modern wide and heavy form is a relatively new practice and that baroque and classical periods players were less inclined in using it.
I also understands that there has always been a wide variety of clarinet playing including the heavy use of vibrato, but it seems to me that there is today an overwhelming number of clarinet players who do not vibrate in a context where almost every other instrument does.
Any experts in the history of clarinet vibrato practice ?
--
Sylvain Bouix <sbouix@gmail.com>
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Author: george
Date: 2008-10-21 22:43
I'm not much of a clarinetist, or a musician for that matter, but I have a simple comment: clarinet vibrato just doesn't sound very good to me.
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Author: cxgreen48
Date: 2008-10-21 22:49
I think clarinet vibrato just sounds awkward and very "forced." But the whole thing is a preference thing anyway, isn't it?
edit: although I think sometimes flute vibrato can sound "forced" at time too.
Post Edited (2008-10-21 22:50)
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Author: Ryan25
Date: 2008-10-21 22:54
I love clarinetists who use vibrato in a refined manner.
Harold Wright's was great.
Stolzman in person is amazing.
I've heard John Yeh use it in Chicago and thought it was effective.
I think it is only a problem if a player chooses to use it all the time. A hint of it here or there and for specific musical reasons is great with me. I've been working on it a bit myself and plan on using it in the future once I have better controll of it and a better understanding of how to use it.
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Author: mrn
Date: 2008-10-21 23:12
Tony Pay wrote:
> Mike wrote:
>
> >> Yet, two of the most famous clarinetists in history believed
> to have used vibrato were German and Austrian, respectively,
> namely Richard Muhlfeld and Anton Stadler!>>
>
> Source?
Well, if I had seen your post before writing mine, I probably wouldn't have included that sentence! It was no accident that I said "believed" to have used vibrato and didn't say that I was the one doing the believing! I really should have said "believed by some." Maybe I'll go back and edit my old post.
I remember reading about Muhlfeld many years ago (when I was in high school). Since you mentioned that Brymer's book was the only source you were aware of, that's probably where I first read it, since I remember reading Brymer as a high school student. I have to say, I'm a bit disappointed to hear that Brymer's remark about Muhlfeld is completely unsubstantiated. Not because I like clarinet vibrato, but because I expected more than that from Brymer. In light of what you wrote, Brymer's remarks sound increasingly like they are nothing more than an apologia for his own use of vibrato.
I actually don't particularly care for the sound of vibrato on clarinet and I never use it for classical playing (with two rare exceptions: the composer writes it into the score [which I've never seen] or it's the intro to Rhapsody in Blue, where I put a very slight jazz "quaver" into the high C, which is a completely different animal from classical "vibrato" IMHO). There are few players, IMHO, who can pull off a really tasteful vibrato on clarinet, and for those who can, I'm not sure how much it really adds to their playing. That's just my opinion, though.
As far as Stadler goes, the only ostensibly reputable "source" I have is the same hearsay (via Jonathan Cohler's online article on this website) regarding Charles Neidich's argument regarding Stadler you mention in your Klarinet post. It's evidence that *someone* (indeed, someone who *ought* to know more than me about this) thinks its plausible that Stadler might have used vibrato, but it's not enough to convince me that he did. About all I can say is what I suggested, that *if* we live in a world where it's plausible that Stadler and Muhlfeld both played with vibrato, that would suggest that making historical generalizations about this topic is very hard to do. (At least it would suggest it to me, because I don't know any better).
There is at least one book I have seen (although clearly not intended as a scholarly or professional reference) where it is actually taken for granted that Stadler and Muhlfeld used vibrato, namely "Classical Music: The Listener's Companion" by Alexander J. Morin and Harold C. Schonberg. I certainly wouldn't cite it as a source if I were writing a paper, and it doesn't purport to be an authoritative reference. Nonetheless, if the theory that Stadler used vibrato is just one person's theory and completely unsubstantiated, they're doing a *real* disservice to their readers by reporting this theory as if it were generally accepted as true, because it at least suggests that someone with some authority takes this theory seriously and that there's a bona fide debate going on.
From what you're saying, though, it sounds like this is not really being debated by serious scholars--it's just Neidich's pet theory, which, for all I know, may be nothing more than another apologia by someone who plays Mozart with vibrato. (I'm now listening to his K581 quintet recording, and occasionally I can notice a slight vibrato to some of the notes). Is that the case (that it's just Neidich's theory, nobody else's)?
Post Edited (2008-10-22 03:55)
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Author: Dileep Gangolli
Date: 2008-10-21 23:25
A great discussion as there is really two camps regarding use of vibrato in classical clarinet playing.
I must say that I have heard beautiful playing with and without it.
The argument for using it is that it gives a more vocal quality to the line.
The argument against is that the tone of the clarinet is complete and therefore does not need vibrato.
I think that either works but if one uses vibrato, one has to have taste and control to bring it off.
Also, there are different ways to vibrato (jaw, throat, diaphram) which results in different tone colors, amplitudes, and pitch deviation.
Would love to hear from others about this topic as I believe it remains the most controversial issue in modern clarinet playing!
PS Neither of my primary teachers (Marcellus and Gigliotti) subscribed to vibrato. But I have no problem with it.
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2008-10-22 06:21
For the people who posted here that wrote "classical" or "classical clarinet playing"... what do you mean? Only the classical period? Or the common way to mean pretty much all composed music that is in the same, hmm... type of "culture"? I hope this is clear, since there is obviously completely written music that isn't classical in any of the meanings.
Especially if the latter, but maybe also for the former, I don't consider that it's possible to say whether vibrato is good or not. Not even about specific types of vibrato. Only when you consider it with specific music it is possible to "judge" it. But not only how a specific place in a specific piece, for example, will sound "better" or "worse" with vibrato, but maybe how the entire piece will be affected by using vibrato, maybe even in one place (or the entire piece might not be affected at all).
I read Tony's links. I can give an example of a piece I played a couple of years ago. One part, I guess about five minutes long, is a very slow clarinet melody, which has only very slow long notes, and is accompanied by slow chords on piano. I played it sometimes without any vibrato and sometimes with some vibrato.
So in Tony's knife and screwdriver comparison, it's the same as when I open a screw on a clarinet, for the same screw I would sometimes not use the same screwdriver. Eventhough the screwdrivers are different, one is not necessarily better than the other. So with the screw, maybe I chose to use a specific screwdriver because it was closer, so was more comfortable, which is a totally logical reason for a screw.
With playing the piece, maybe I chose to play with or without vibrato because the way I played the entire piece (or part of the piece) in a specific performance made more sense to use or not use vibrato. Many pieces it is obviously possible to play in several different ways, and for some of those pieces, using or not using vibrato is one of the possible ways to play it differently, dpeending on the logic of the whole piece.
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Author: NorbertTheParrot
Date: 2008-10-22 08:59
This topic has come up many times. What I think is new is Bartmann's suggestion that there may be a reason related to the physics of the instrument that many people find clarinet vibrato unnatural or unpleasant. I'm not sure I believe his explanation, but it's an interesting idea.
On the general question of vibrato, it seems to me that (as in every matter of interpretation) there are two major considerations, and we should not confuse them:
1. What did the composer intend? For music written since the advent of sound recording, we can generally be reasonably sure that the composer expected flutes and strings to play with a very noticeable vibrato, and clarinets with little or no vibrato. If the composer wanted something different from this norm, he would probably say so in the score. For older music, we have rather little evidence. Did Brahms expect vibrato from Muehlfeld? Did Mozart expect vibrato from Stadler? (I'm tempted to think yes and no respectively, but on no good evidence!)
2. What does the audience like to hear? Cohler has argued that, given the choice, audiences prefer the clarinet to be played with vibrato. I don't know of any other comparable experiment - Tony Pay condemns Cohler's conclusion without, so far as I know, offering any experimental evidence of his own.
I hope we can all agree that "Never use vibrato" and "Always use vibrato" are equally absurd positions.
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Author: BobD
Date: 2008-10-22 11:08
Vibrato can be likened to spice(s) used with food.
In my own experience in school bands many years ago ALL the conductors/directors abhorred vibrato and I am led to believe that there were three reasons: One was that it was considered out of place in military band music. The second was that if one clarinetist (or two) used it and the other players didn't it "spoiled" the sound of the clarinet section. The third reason is that it was considered the result of a weak embouchure. Since the majority of clarinet players ....in the U.S. ....were being instructed for school band performance my opinion is that the source of the objection was the school band movement and its military underpinning.
Bob Draznik
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Author: jeeves
Date: 2008-10-22 11:58
No one's actually said how to use the diaphragm, lips, etc. to do vibrato on the clarinet. How do you do it?
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Author: FrankM
Date: 2008-10-22 12:16
If "proof" surfaced that Stadler and Muhlfield used vibrato like modern string players do, would it make a difference to those who don't like it?
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Author: skygardener
Date: 2008-10-22 12:18
There is one thing to note about vibrato use in strings.
According to a performance practice class I took during grad school, vibrato was added as a general practice for all strings only in the past 100 years. During the 19th C. it was more used by soloists and possibly small ensembles. And during the Baroque, it was regarded as an ornamentation (for all instruments other than keyboards) that could be used during the last few moments of a long note- just as it tapers off.
Even for strings, though, there is appropriate and inappropriate usage, regardless of period. This reminds me of what a violin teacher said during a masterclass I saw. It was part of a week long festival and he was commenting on the previous night's performance by a professional quartet. He said, "It was so annoying. The cellist was playing like he was discovering the meaning of life in every note. WAWAWAWAWAWA!"
-
On a clarinet note, I have a recording of the Mozart Concerto by Lancelot (WPCS-21050) in which he uses an incredibly fast vibrato on just about all the long notes- even during the second movement.
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Author: Ebclarinet1
Date: 2008-10-22 13:01
I've played oboe since 1967 and I can't imagine NOT using vibrato with it. My teacher had me only use it though when a note was 2 beats long in 4/4 meter at a metronome marking of 100. She convinced me that using it constantly throughout the piece, especially on fast notes tended to blur the sound too much and also sort of dull your senses so that it isn't as interesting when yu use it on the longer notes. One of the oboists that I play with now sort of does it constantly and I can see her point. It is much less interesting to use it constantly than for emphasis or to make a sustained note sound more interesting.
I do use it on clarinet, but with the same sort of caveats that I do on oboe. Use it only on sustained notes and get rid of it when it sounds forced or weird. I do use a rather fast vibrato on clarinet, especially on the Eefer. When used in ensemble performances it does tend to blend better with the oboe and flute if vibrato is used IMHO. Sound of the piccol and Eefer seems to fight a little less with some vibrato too. Anything with a Klezmer or jazz sort of sound would be the right place to use an even more extreme sort of vibrato.
Anyway., my two cents..
Eefer guy
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Author: mrn
Date: 2008-10-22 14:00
FrankM wrote:
> If "proof" surfaced that Stadler and Muhlfield used vibrato like modern
> string players do, would it make a difference to those who don't like it?
My guess is, probably not. Reading Brymer didn't make me want to go out and add vibrato to Brahms, and at the time I figured Brymer knew what he was talking about.
My point with regard to bringing up Stadler and Muhlfeld was that if a convincing argument could be made that Stadler and Muhlfeld used vibrato, it would make it harder to make generalizations about the historical use of vibrato along a French school/German school divide.
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Author: FrankM
Date: 2008-10-22 18:28
My question about "proof" surfacing wasn't directed at any particular reponse above.....I was thinking that some have written the most important aspect of a players performance is to be true to the composers intentions....so if it turns out Mozart/Brahms heard vibrato when they wrote their pieces, would we all adjust and start using vibrato?
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Author: rtmyth
Date: 2008-10-22 19:22
Kell used it but Sir Thomas B did not like it.
richard smith
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Author: mrn
Date: 2008-10-22 21:42
FrankM wrote:
<<so if it turns out Mozart/Brahms heard vibrato when they wrote their pieces, would we all adjust and start using vibrato?>>
Would we ALL do it? Well, I think the answer to that is obvious. Plenty of people have already played/recorded Mozart and/or Brahms with vibrato (e.g., Stolzman, Kell, Johnson, Wright, Drucker), and plenty of people don't use vibrato for either composer's works. Maybe some people would be inclined to change they way they perform those works in response to such a discovery, but you know there are going to be plenty of people who don't, and that's OK.
As Tony pointed out, it's a choice, not a dogma. In the end, we all have to be artists and make good art. For some of us that means no vibrato and for others it means vibrato. I like Tony's analogy of the screwdriver and the knife because it points out that vibrato is a tool for conveying musical ideas, but it is not the only tool or even always the best one.
Besides, even if we find some "proof" that either of these players played with vibrato, what does that really mean? Was it a wide vibrato, a narrow vibrato, a quick one, slow one, etc.? I mean, there's vibrato and then there's vibrato.
Another thought--even though Mozart and Brahms wrote for specific clarinetists, we may never really know just how much influence these players' playing styles (or what aspects of their respective styles) had on the composers' ideas. In the case of Brahms, for instance, he wrote quite a number of pieces for piano first before orchestrating them. Brahms' Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn, which my orchestra is playing later this week, is one of those pieces. So if you can imagine Brahms sitting at the piano and playing around with musical ideas to put into his clarinet sonata, there's a good chance he isn't necessarily thinking about vibrato while he's sitting there at the keyboard (since pianists don't play with vibrato).
The same sort of thing has been said by other people about Spohr (who appears to have been thinking like a string player when he wrote his clarinet concertos because he wasn't thinking about giving the player a place to breathe). I've said the same sort of thing about Copland and his clarinet concerto on the BBoard--namely that there are parts of Copland that sound like they were written at the piano without regard for the technical aspects of playing them on a clarinet. When I took private instruction in music composition several years ago, my composition teacher also commented on the same sort of phenomenon, which is that composers (especially those who write at the piano) tend to write music that they themselves can play on their own instrument. In that respect, the original player Brahms wrote for was probably really *himself* as a pianist, and in that respect the vibrato issue might not have even factored into the conception of the original musical ideas.
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Author: hans
Date: 2008-10-22 22:52
I don't know why this should continue to be controversial. Vibrato is simply a technique that we use when it is appropriate to do so. The "when it is appropriate" part may require some judgment on the part of the performer, unless she/he plays in the Lombardo band.
Hans
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Author: mrn
Date: 2008-10-23 02:37
OK. I have a confession to make. Until just now I had not read the physics portion of Jonathan Cohler's article on vibrato (which is on this website).
But now that I have, I have to agree with Tony about the physics section of the article--a lot of it is simply not right! Having now read this portion of the article and being rather disturbed by it, I couldn't sit by without saying something, and I don't know where else to say this so I'm putting it here. If you don't want to read all the science/math, you can jump to the bottom and read my conclusion which, I think, does pertain directly to the original post and has some non-scientific ramifications.
First of all, what Tony said about Fourier's theorem is true. All periodic functions are sums of sinusoidal functions (sometimes the sums are infinitely long), where each of the sinusoids is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency (i.e., the sinusoids are "harmonically related").
Second, it's simply not true that any physical system driven with a sinusoidal input will vibrate only at that frequency, as Cohler claims. That's a property of a LINEAR system. Most real-world physical systems (the clarinet mouthpiece/reed system is a good example) are non-linear. Some of these systems (like the bore of a clarinet) are almost linear. Others (like the reed and mouthpiece combination) have noticeable non-linear characteristics.
The reed and mouthpiece create periodic vibrations and thus drive the bore of the instrument with a periodic input, not with white noise, as Cohler claims (white noise is a completely random signal with no periodic component at all). Because the reed and mouthpiece drive the clarinet bore with a periodic input, whether the signal as a whole looks like a sinusoid or not, the driving input is, in fact, mathematically, a sum of harmonically related sinusoids (possibly an infinite number of them).
Some of these sinusoids are resonated by the clarinet bore and others are filtered out by the clarinet bore--this is, at least in part, due to the fact that the resonant frequencies of the bore do not have to be integer multiples of each other. This filtering out of certain harmonics is what gives the clarinet its characteristic sound. Nonetheless, the actual sound produced is still a sum of sinusoidal signals, where each sinusoid is an integer multiple of the fundamental. The clarinet bore changes the relative amplitudes of these sinusoids, but that doesn't change the fact that they are harmonically related sinusoids.
Now, another claim that Cohler makes that I take issue with is that diaphragm vibrato can't possibly be a form of amplitude modulation and must be viewed as frequency modulation because you can see a change in the frequency spectrum of the sound when you examine a tone with vibrato on the spectrum analyzer. That's not true, however, because as it turns out, you can see pure amplitude modulation on a spectrum analyzer, too!
I won't bore everyone with the math unless somebody wants to see it, but suffice it to say that with a little bit of high school trigonometry you can easily see that a single sinusoid with a sinusoidal amplitude-modulating vibrato applied to it decomposes into a sum of three sinusoids at different frequencies, a louder one with the frequency of the original note, a small (i.e., not as loud) one slightly higher in frequency than the original note, and another equally small one slightly lower in frequency. You would be able to see this on a spectrum analyzer, even though what I've been referring to is pure amplitude modulation (i.e., only the volume of the note is being varied).
Of course, if the note played with vibrato is not a pure sinusoid (clarinet notes are not pure sinusoids), the note will still be a sum of sinusoids (because it's a periodic signal), so what you get with vibrato is that these extra little sinusoids appear on either side of EACH HARMONIC! (This is why the channels on your AM radio are spaced at 10 kHz intervals, by the way)
So vibrato doesn't EMPHASIZE dissonances between overtones, as Cohler quotes Joshua Proschan as stating. Rather, vibrato CREATES dissonances with the overtones by surrounding each overtone with non-harmonic frequencies! You can actually think of a note with vibrato as being a specialized form of dissonant multiphonic, where the vibrations you hear in vibrato are actually the beat frequencies of this multiphonic!
CONCLUSION:
Vibrato is a special kind of dissonance. A note with vibrato (from the standpoint of sound, as opposed to technique) can actually be thought of as a specialized type of dissonant multiphonic. As with all forms of dissonance, it takes care to make vibrato aesthetically pleasing!
Post Edited (2008-10-24 15:08)
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