Five Kinds of Vibrato

Wikipedia gives a pretty decent introduction to the musical technique of vibrato:

Vibrato (Italian, from past participle of "vibrare", to vibrate) is a musical effect consisting of a regular, pulsating change of pitch. It is used to add expression to vocal and instrumental music. Vibrato is typically characterised in terms of two factors: the amount of pitch variation ("extent of vibrato") and the speed with which the pitch is varied ("rate of vibrato").

In singing it can occur spontaneously through variations in the larynx. The vibrato of a string instrument and wind instrument is an imitation of that vocal function.

I could quibble with some of that, of course. Vibrato does not have to be and often isn't all that "regular." One frequently changes the pace of vibrato for musical effect. Vibrato is used more in some genres than others. My mother, for example, an old-time Canadian fiddler, never used vibrato and in fact, did not know how to do vibrato, or at least claimed not to. Classical violinists typically use vibrato in varying amounts depending on the era and style of the piece in question, less in Baroque music, more in Romantic music--but there are lots of ongoing controversies about it.

I want to talk about vibrato on the guitar as that is the instrument I am most familiar with. Correct me if I am wrong, bowed instrument players, but I believe that vibrato on the violin and similar instruments is produced by rolling back and forth on the ball of the finger stopping the note on the fingerboard? As there are no frets, this produces a fluctuation in the pitch, both above and below the "correct" pitch. What do gamba players do, I wonder, or do they just avoid vibrato?

In any case, rolling around on the ball of your fingertip does not do much on fretted instruments as the location of the fret fixes the pitch of the note. So what do guitarists do? It varies according to the type of guitar and genre. Here, for example, is an excellent discussion of how blues guitarists create vibrato:

You get the essence of it in the first minute from the great authority, B. B. King! I played electric blues guitar for several years when I was young, but for the life of me I can't actually recall how I did vibrato. Bending notes, sure, but vibrato? As B. B. hints at in the clip, his method only really produces a vibrato between the pitch and slightly above the pitch. It is a kind of heightened expression that, "shimmers." Another famous practitioner is Eric Clapton and he talks about it in an interview somewhere.

Bending notes is quite different on the classical guitar as opposed to the steel string one. You have to work a lot harder bending notes on nylon strings and it is never as effective. As the blues vibrato is basically a kind of note-bending, pushing the string to one side, it is not a good technique on classical guitar. So what do we do instead? On steel string guitars, you bend notes and do vibrato by increasing the string tension by pushing the string to one side. You are basically raising the pitch by increasing the tension. On classical guitar, you do it slightly differently. You also increase the tension but by pulling on the string laterally instead of pushing it to one side. Imagine you are stopping a note on, say, the fifth or seventh fret. If you move your arm away from your body while keeping the pressure on the string you will raise the tension and hence the pitch. If you move your arm toward your body you will be lowering the tension of the vibrating part of the string and therefore lowering the pitch. It is a kind of a see-saw: as you push or pull the string, the tension raises on one side and lowers on the other. This gives you a vibrato on both sides of the "correct" pitch, as with the violin.

The hitch is that this only works if you have sufficient string length on either side. Once you get down to the end of the fingerboard close to the tuners, it won't work because you have almost no string length on the non-vibrating part of the string. So what do you do there? Essentially a variant of what B. B. is showing in the clip: you let your thumb loose and pull the string to one side with a wiggling motion of the finger. It works well enough, but not as satisfactory as the vibrato higher on the fingerboard. For that kind, the closer you are to the middle of the string, the easier it is.

When I was a young student in Spain, studying with José Tomás, I remember hearing another student say that Tomás taught that there were five kinds of vibrato. We never got into that in any of my lessons and it never came up in the master class so I don't know what the "five kinds" actually were. I could speculate a bit...

In a lute treatise somewhere the author mentions an odd and very subtle kind of vibrato that is actually not a vibrato at all, but a kind of tremolo (a quickly repeated note). While holding a note with the index finger of the left hand, you could, very gently, tap several times on the vibrating string close to the end being stopped. If done lightly and carefully enough it will result in a kind of fluttering note. This is used for expressive effect in 17th century lute music.

Ok, that, with the two before, gives us three kinds of vibrato. What do you do if you have an open string and want to do vibrato? I suppose that an electric guitarist might use the whammy bar, push on the neck, or just fiddle with the string after the nut, but those are not going to work on a classical guitar. What you can do is shake the whole guitar. While not hugely effective, it will do something.

Last but not least, if all else fails, you just shake your head!

Q. E. D. Five kinds of vibrato.

The Prelude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos is particularly well suited to the use of vibrato because of the way the melody is distributed over the strings. Here is a performance by John Williams (sorry about the sound quality, but the vibrato is pretty evident):

Here is Andrés Segovia with a more variable vibrato:

Etudes

The Wall Street Journal, as part of its useful Masterpiece series, has an essay on the Transcendental Etudes by Liszt. They begin with a history of the instrumental technical study:

By the first years of the 19th century, the piano had become the major domestic musical instrument. Composers began turning out countless études (studies), short pieces of music designed to help student pianists achieve technical competence in scales, arpeggios, octaves, trills and so forth.

Mostly, these concoctions were musically arid and unmemorable. Carl Czerny (1791-1857), Beethoven’s prize pupil, was king of the étude, profitably churning out such pieces. They are helpful, but in their medicinal content they have been practiced grudgingly throughout the generations. H.L. Mencken, a lifelong amateur pianist, wrote, “As late as 1930, being in Vienna, I desecrated Czerny’s grave.”

One wonders if other piano students have wished to do the same... This bare-bones account could be fleshed out by saying that the piano in its fortepiano incarnation, had been the leading domestic musical instrument for several decades. What had changed was the growth of domestic music-making. Whereas in the 18th century the tendency was for music production to be centered around the great aristocratic estates, after the French Revolution more and more a prosperous middle class turned to music-making in the home. The piano was the instrument of choice, both in solo pieces and transcriptions and as an accompaniment to vocal works. The interesting thing is that it was these amateur musicians that spurred the development of an immense repertoire of technical studies. In the hands of someone like Liszt, the mundane technical etude became a work, not only of considerable virtuosity, but also of considerable musical content.

Liszt had retired from the concert stage at age 36 and now lived in Weimar as court composer and conductor. He was at the dawn of his legendary teaching career. In 1851 he revised and entirely reworked his études, eliminating the dross while retaining their daring virtuosity, and adding to their sonorous splendor and romantic allure. While still among the most difficult works in the repertoire, the third version achieved a magnificent playability. For all but two he added an evocative title, now calling the cycle “Etudes d’exécution transcendante.”

For a little sample, here is Evgeny Kissin with the Etude No. 10:

In recent years a couple of composers have made considerable contributions to the piano etude repertoire. Between 1985 and 2001 Ligeti composed 18 etudes for piano. Here is Yuja Wang playing No. 4 from Bk 1:

Philip Glass wrote twenty etudes for piano between 1994 and 2012. Here is Maki Namekawa with etudes Nos. 9 and 20:

A completely different approach was taken by Conlon Nancarrow who labored for years cutting piano rolls by hand to create piano etudes that could simply not be played by an actual pianist. Here is his Study for Player Piano No. 37:

Now I know what you are wondering, what about etudes for guitar? We have a few examples starting with some mundane, if charming, ones by Fernando Sor in the early 19th century. Here is John Williams with studies Nos. 17 to 19 from Segovia's edition:

There are a few later examples from the 19th century including some nice ones by Carcassi, but the really virtuoso etudes were all written in the 20th century. A while back I posted about the Brouwer studies, but the major concert etudes are a set of twelve by Villa-Lobos. They were written in Paris between 1924 and 1928, but not published until 1953. There is a nifty new critical edition published in 2011. The etudes are dedicated to Segovia, who wrote the preface to the first edition, but he only played a few of them. They are very difficult and it took a few decades for guitar technique to catch up to their demands. Nowadays the gifted thirteen-year-old virtuoso Leonora Spangenburger can play the demanding arpeggio study that is Etude No. 1 with great aplomb:

I have always found the Etude 10 one of the most challenging because of its slurs with fixed fingers. Here is a performance by Paulo Martelli:

Probably the most prolific composer of guitar etudes recently is Angelo Gilardino whose Studi di virtuosità e di transcendenza extend to several volumes. I have played several from the first few books where each is a homage to a different composer from guitar composers like Castelnuovo-Tedesco to ones like Prokofiev and Bartók and artists like Goya. His Study No. 6 from the first series titled "Soledad" is a homage to Goya. Here it is played by Bradford Werner:

That completes our tour of the piano and guitar etude.

Practice?

Courtesy of Norman Lebrecht I ran across an entertaining memoir about playing in orchestra. Nathan Cole reminisces:

The following day, I moved back to my assigned seat near the back of the second violins. I began marking some fingerings in the toughest passages. Since I was sitting on the audience side, or the “outside” of the stand, my markings went above the notes. At least that’s how things had always worked…

As I put in my first set of numbers, my stand partner made a sound, a kind of groan cut short. I looked over, the point of my pencil still on the page. “Did you want my markings on the bottom instead?”

    “We don’t mark fingerings here,” he said.

    “Here, you mean at this spot?”

    “I mean in this orchestra.” His face softened, and he added, “Sorry, you’re probably used to seeing them, right?”

I was indeed used to seeing fingerings as a matter of course. My mind was fairly blown.

    “How do you play all this music then?”

My stand partner paused, as if he’d never considered the question before.

    “Practice?” he suggested.

Orchestras are a fascinating sub-culture and I often wished I had played an instrument that would allow me to spend more time with them. My total orchestral experience consists in playing a fairly brief guitar part in a few operas (and one mandolin part in Mozart's Don Giovanni) as well as playing the solo part in several guitar concertos. But I have spent a great deal of time hanging out with orchestral players, so that gives me a few insights as well. The symphony orchestra is one of the most highly-developed and finely-tuned (heh!) organizations that civilization has ever invented. It integrates around a hundred highly-trained musicians into a single instrument of enormous power. It is also the source of a zillion amusing anecdotes, such as the one above.

Here are some others I have heard regarding notes penciled on orchestral parts. Oh, just a note for readers not familiar with the terms. A composer creates a "score" where all the notes played by the individual instruments are placed together in a vertical table. This is what the conductor has on his stand as it enables him to see everything and, most important, how it all fits together. Each individual player (or pair of players in the string sections) has just his individual part, so as to avoid innumerable page turns. Occasionally this part might have cues of the other instruments. Often there are long passages of nothing but rests that have to be carefully counted.

Supposedly, on the original parts used in the premiere of the Rite of Spring in 1913, the orchestral players had scratched out "Sacre du Printemps" and replaced it with "Massacre du Printemps". The English version was "Riot of Spring" instead of "Rite of Spring". In one orchestra who struggled a bit with a conductor known as "Pizzabeat" for the wide and vague gestures he made while conducting, there were a few notes scribbled in the score to the effect of "Don't look up!" meaning, in this particular passage do NOT look at the conductor who will be sure to mislead you.

Going back to Cole's anecdote, I can see where a particularly seasoned orchestra might not want their parts cluttered up with too many fingerings. As a guitarist, however, I think that fingerings written in the score are extremely valuable--even if you do practice! I do know that the principal in each section of the strings has the job of putting in bowings for all the players in his section. This is important for unity of phrasing.

And of course, the indelible rule of all musicians is NEVER WRITE IN THE SCORE WITH PEN, ALWAYS WITH PENCIL. Because sure as taxes, down the road you are going to want to erase those silly fingerings and replace them with better ones.

I have to admit though, that the idea of an orchestra so seasoned and experienced that they don't really need to put in fingerings is rather an appealing one. Perhaps one such orchestra is the Vienna Philharmonic, who have been doing what they do, institutionally, for rather a long time. I think my favorite clip of them is with Leonard Bernstein. He is conducting the last movement of the Symphony No 88 by Joseph Haydn and I think it is an encore. Since the Vienna Phillies have been playing Haydn for, oh a couple of hundred years and since Lenny is Lenny, after he gives the downbeat, he mostly just stands around conducting with his eyebrows. I can see a couple of audience members looking a little perplexed: "is that what they pay him for?" But the orchestra knows exactly what is going on: Bernstein is paying them the public compliment of showing that this orchestra is so good that they hardly need conducting:

Technique and Expression

We usually think that the typical situation is that we work to achieve a certain level of technical competence so that we can express something. This seems to be as true of composers as it is of performers. There is a good example in the Beatles  Anthology 2 in the first version of "Strawberry Fields Forever" recorded by John at home. He is trying to finger-pick the guitar part, but gets tangled up and stops, saying "I canna do it!" He didn't learn to finger-pick until a year or so later as we can hear in "Julia" from The White Album. Obviously the lack of finger-picking chops didn't hold back the recording of "Strawberry Fields".

Technique is what is known in philosophical circles as an "instrumental good", i.e. something good only as a means to a true good, an "intrinsic good". For example, money has no intrinsic worth, but only value as a means to an end. Some philosophers think that the only real intrinsic goods are states of consciousness like happiness, for example. So technique, in the sense of ability to play or compose, is an instrumental good. The intrinsic good it is the means to is the expression, or rather, the state of consciousness aimed at in the ideal listener.

But things are more complicated than this. Technique sometimes is mistaken for an intrinsic good. John Lennon didn't make that mistake, that is, he didn't spend the next six months working on his finger-picking technique. Instead he dumped that technique as being simply unavailable and kept searching for the true expression of "Strawberry Fields". The odd thing, of course, is that it didn't exist yet. Hunting for "Strawberry Fields" was not like hunting for mushrooms in the woods as "Strawberry Fields" was nothing more than a sketchy idea for a possible future song. But that's what composers and song-writers do...

Getting back to the point: things are complicated because you don't know exactly the end, the intrinsic good, you are aiming for. All you have is a bunch of techniques. Which may or may not be appropriate. Finger-picking wasn't an appropriate technique so Lennon dumped it. Sometimes you have this foggy idea of something and you just try out, instinctively, different techniques until something seems to click.

Sometimes you are afraid of losing the inchoate expressive idea if you get too 'technical' with it. I suppose there is another Beatles example I could choose: the Phil Spector production version of Let it Be which buries some songs in a "wall of sound".

Sometimes a limitation in technique actually helps the expression and I'm thinking of a very unusual prelude by Bach. The E flat major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1 is a justly-admired prelude, but very atypical. A lot of Bach preludes are a single-minded exploration of an idea. But this one is like an improvisation set down on paper. It begins with a toccata-like improvisation that stops and then starts again as a loose fugal improvisation that then becomes a double fugue as it weaves in material from the first improvisation. This is anything but a tightly-written fugue as the subjects are vague, unstable. As if to contrast with the looseness of the prelude, the following fugue is tightly-written. Together they are like an illustration of the idea that technique and expression are different things and a triumph of technique is not necessarily a triumph of expression. For the truth of the matter is that the prelude is more expressive, more deeply affecting than the jollier fugue that follows.

Bach was heir to the greatest dynasty in Western art. In this prelude and fugue he lets us hear the process of composition as it sketches out different possibilities and at the same time achieves a kind of expression that would not be possible in a more fulfilled form. Have a listen to see what I mean: