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Re: I don't understand "warm," "dark," "covered," et al

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2022-10-17 03:49

Paul Aviles wrote:

> Another example, albeit older, would be Stanley Drucker’s
> recording of the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto. I might go out on
> a limb here and say that a majority of folks who never heard
> him live would say that is a bright sound. However, if you’d
> ever heard him live you would probably not say that at all.
>
Well, that's a whole other related problem. I can't really say I know what most of the clarinetists mentioned in these posts sound like because the *only* experience I have hearing them is through recordings, and then listening using audio equipment that is hardly state-of-the-art. I have heard very few clarinetists live - Gigliotti and the Phila. Orch. players since, Drucker, Shiffrin, dePeyer and a few others whom I have heard in recitals or a few of the visiting orchestras that have come through here.

But then, I heard Shiffrin live twice - once playing next to him in a free-lance orchestra in the 1970s (just after he left Cleveland) and then from the front row of the Perlman Theater about 10 years ago. He sounded entirely different. And then he sounds different still in the recordings I've heard.

I heard Gigliotti often from the audience in the Academy of Music, standing next to him during lessons when he would demonstrate, and in the recordings of the Philadelphia Orchestra that were ubiquitous through the '50s to the '80s or so. The sounds were very different. He described his own sound as "dark." Others have often described it as "bright." It really depends on which sound of his many you heard.

I heard dePeyer play here near Philadelphia in a chamber concert maybe 40 years ago. There was much more color in his sound than his recordings would have suggested to me. The opposite with Drucker - his recordings, especially the early ones under Bernstein screamed "bright!!!" to my ears, but when I heard him live decades later he sounded very different - smooth, controlled, clear. Not "dark" but certainly not "bright" either.

I could name a few more players whose sounds were different on different occasions when I heard them live and different still on recordings.

So, when we start comparing players' sounds as a way of defining the words we try so desperately to justify and use, we really have to know which recording or which performance is being used as the exemplar.

The problem at its root is that we try to use words that evolved and are understood fairly clearly to describe visual qualities. I'm not sure why an equally clear set of sound descriptors hasn't evolved in parallel. Maybe they have in other languages and only English is aurally deficient. But it seems obvious that the visual vocabulary we try to force won't do the job reliably.

Karl

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