Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-07-24 21:50
I find that the quality of sound in a trill, like the quality of sound in any fast passage, is crucial.
It's always struck me that what one might call, early Paris Conservatoire style clarinet playing – reedy, perhaps a bit thin in quality, lots of high harmonics compared with fundamental – works exceptionally well in fast, complicated passagework, which is what French composers mostly wrote for the players of the time.
You can make a caricature of it by over-closing the reed and making your oral cavity small, squeezing the sound so that it's very tight. Then, if you play a trill, the sound is 'matt' rather than 'shiny'.
But you don't hear it as 'nasty', as you would on a single note. Rather, the trill sounds brilliant in a different way.
It's not too difficult to imagine why this is. THAT sort of sound 'dies' quickly in an acoustic, because high frequencies are absorbed preferentially – think of the ripple that is interrupted by the side of the boat, while the wave lifts the boat and passes on, and the fact that you hear mostly the bass at the noisy neighbour's party.
So with this sort of sound, the sound of one note doesn't overlap the sound of the following note so much, when it appears.
I think that why trills sound 'nasty' when the lower frequencies dominate is that adjacent notes are sounding simultaneously, and you get all those jangly difference tones. The effect is much less disturbing in the open air, where of course there is no acoustic.
Try it. You can begin a trill with a 'good' sound, and immediately prolong it with, well, not a BAD sound, but a sound you'd judge to be bad if it were used on a single note.
Of course, it is 'quieter' too, as others have suggested as a solution. But if you CONCENTRATE on the quietness, you risk losing the point of the trill in the first place...
Tony
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The Clarinet BBoard
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