Too Much Vibrato Poem by gershon hepner

Some compare it to goats bleating,
others find it too intense,
its acoustic central heating
causing purists great offense.
To vibrato I refer,
musically now controversial,
unlike toys some girls prefer,
finding tools that are commercial
more successful than the flesh
which cannot vibrate, but merely
energetically can thresh,
causing climaxes just yearly
for, unfortunately, many
women, who move on to toys,
getting hardly ever any
climaxes from tools of boys.

Daniel Wakin discusses the use of vibrato in the performance of Elgar’s music (“Elgar Without Vibrato? Fiddlesticks, ” NYT, August 13,2008) :
The Great Vibrato Controversy is sending tremors through, well, a small corner of British cultural life. The conductor Roger Norrington, a champion of playing classical music in the style of its day, says he may play Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” March No.1 on the last night of Britain’s premier music festival, the Proms, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, without vibrato. Oh, the horror! True, it is not the stuff to tear down an empire. But traditionalists in England are in a huff, sending rockets of outrage into the blogosphere and newspaper columns. “Elgar without vibrato is the musical equivalent of dead roses, ” Stephen Pollard, a columnist, harrumphed in The Times of London last week. As a rule, Elgar’s music has been played with the lusher, fuller sound produced by that slight oscillation of pitch called vibrato, which is typical of modern playing. But Mr. Norrington argues that orchestras in Elgar’s day played with much less vibrato, and that an unadulterated sound better suits the music. The dispute sits atop the intersection of deeper issues, like British national pride and how to bring art of the past back to life. At the heart of the kerfuffle lies the reputation of Edward Elgar, the quintessentially British composer in a country that can be sensitive about its relative dearth of great masters. Elgar, who wrote works including the “Enigma” Variations and a popular cello concerto, is best known for the “Pomp and Circumstance” March, which is a staple at high school graduation ceremonies even in America….
“We value clarity, transparency, precision, sharpness, rather than what some people consider the excessive lyricism and indulgence and big sound of previous eras, ” said Nicholas Kenyon, the former Proms director who engaged Mr. Norrington. As for vibrato, it has been used throughout music history to varying degrees, often applied in small dollops to intensify expression, before becoming part of the basic string sound in the first decades of the last century. String players create it by moving fingers slightly back and forth on the fingerboard, wind players most often by oscillating the air flow. Mr. Norrington has taken vibratoless playing farther than most, issuing recordings of works by Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mahler and Wagner with his Stuttgart orchestra using what he prefers to call “pure tone” rather than vibrato-free. He wrote an article on the subject for The New York Times in 2003. Byron Adams, a musicologist at the University of California, Riverside, and a leading Elgar scholar, said Mr. Norrington was somewhat extreme in stripping away vibrato from Elgar’s music. But he lauded the effort to tone down a “hyperintense expressionistic quality” that came to be the norm in the 1960s.In an interview last Wednesday, Mr. Norrington was coy about how the BBC Symphony Orchestra will sound when he conducts it at the Proms’ final night. He said he would ask the players in rehearsal what they preferred in matters of vibrato. But he was unwavering about his own preference. He cited a Schoenberg reference to vibrato as “goat bleating, ” called the heavily vibrating French woodwind sections of the 1920s “earthquake zones” and referred to the practice as “acoustic central heating.” Pure tone, he said, is a beautiful thing that restores a sense of innocence and dignity to Romantic music and makes phrasing more important.

8/13/08