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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: You don't like vibrato? - Read this posted by Chris from Lafayette on March 18, 2007 at 19:35:38:
Funny - when I wrote to Hurwitz about this article, he replied that he thought many of the HIPPLF would read a couple of pages, then think to themselves, "He's full of it!", and go back to their anti-vibrato biases supported by all the academicians entrenched in today's universities.So here are some points from the article which I thought were particularly well taken:
1. For a phenomenon which is said to have appeared suddenly around the time of World War II (i.e., the ubiquitous use of orchestral string vibrato), it certainly seems strange that the many conductors who lived through this era make absolutely no mention of this supposed revolution in playing style in their statements, interviews, or memoirs. This group would include folks such as Walter, Klemperer, Szell, Reiner, Monteux (who played for Brahms himself), and many others. Doesn't it seem strange that such a fundamental change in orchestral performance/execution receives not even a passing mention in the writings of any of these conductors?
2. In many cases, the recordings which predate World War II are so poorly engineered (in terms of pitch stability), that it is impossible to tell whether orchestral string vibrato is being used or not. (I mean, really, you could just as easily argue that, based on early recordings, pianos were played with vibrato!)
3. The presence of a "vibrato" indication in some sections of nineteenth-century orchestral scores does NOT mean that no vibrato was used in the other sections. After all, Hurwitz quotes an impressive number of examples in post-World-War-II compostions which contain similar "vibrato" indications, even though everyone (even the early music mafia) agrees that ubiquitous orchestral vibrato was standard in this time period (i.e., post World War II). So what do these "vibrato" indications mean? - It means that the players should use even MORE vibrato than the normal vibrato they use throughout the rest of the work. In this sense, it's the additional intensity of the vibrato which constitutes the "expressive ornament".
Hurwitz argues for the presence of vibrato in orchestral string playing back to the eighteenth century (and in so doing, handily refutes the "vibrato-only-as-a-seldom-used-expressive-ornament" interpretations of treatises by Spohr and Leopold Mozart), so it's no use quoting seventeenth-century treatises - Hurwitz is not arguing back that far.
As Paul Henry Lang was so fond of quoting, Geminiani deemed vibrato "indispensible" in string playing.
For any more than this, you really need to plow through the original article yourself.
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Follow Ups
- OK - Here's part of the Cliff's Notes Version - Chris from Lafayette 21:01:46 03/21/07 (0)
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