Dolmetsch Online - The Story of a Trill


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The Story of a Trill
edited by Brian Blood

Introduction

The mail quoted below comes from a discussion hosted by the recorder-listserv e-group which considered the 'current' practice of 'wide' trills on the recorder. The mailing started with a crie de coeur from Glen Shannon; the remaining mail stemmed from his. Where text is shown in italics, each line prefaced with a >, we have included here a quotation from an earlier note. These appeared in the original mailings. We have left these in where it makes it easier to follow the discussion. We have corrected a number of typographical errors and spelling mistakes. For those unfamiliar with recorder fingering notation, the left hand (upper-most) thumbhole is 0 when closed (X when vented or pinched) and the fingerholes are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6a, 6b and 7a, 7b where the last two pairs are the double holes at the bottom of the instrument. When a hole is uncovered the reference number is omitted

This discussion has been reproduced not to show who is right or who is wrong but to show how reasoned correspondence may illuminate an enormous field, the problem of applying aesthetic judgment to the present day performance of 'early' music.

It is fashionable in today's performance of early music to believe that, like the mayor of Venice, faced with the collapse of the one thousand year old campanile in St. Mark's Piazza, we can 'rebuild' the past, "dov'era e com'era" (where it was, as it was). The protests of those who thought, in 1902, that the square looked better minus the campanile testify to how taste changes for, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art".

Subject: Re: [recorder] intro: B-C trill
From: Glen Shannon
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 12:10:28 -0800

I've been beat up by folks like Marion Verbruggen and Judith Linsenberg for using the trill described below, but I've also seen professionals use it in concerts, so take this for what it's worth. Marion and Judy, and others too, say it is a "false" trill and you should learn to trill using the "proper way" (not that I agree 100% with this, mind you):

(These are on C instruments- on F instruments the two notes are F and E)
Play C: T2
Play B: T1
(we're all familiar with this fingering notation, right? T is left thumb and 1 is left index finger, 2 left middle finger, etc. down to the bottom hole 7.)

Switch back and forth between those two fingerings just a couple of times to establish the tones in the listener's ear. THEN just play B (T1) and trill on finger 1. By baroque sensibilities, the ear hears a half-step trill, even though you know you're really trilling between B and C#. Just don't lift the finger too high, to keep the upper note flat.

These days I have more of a tendency to trill the way stated below, unless I'm playing baroque music for a judge, like in a master class. The problem with the B at T023 is that it's sharp and is used as an alternate "piano" fingering for regular B at T1. (Play the sharp fingering and lower the breath pressure to get the note in tune, and presto: dynamics on the recorder! You can do this with nearly every note, and there are forte fingerings too, basically add a finger lower down to flatten the note and blow harder to bring it up to pitch.) So I add finger 6 when trilling to keep the alternate B in tune. I'll probably get beat up over that sometime too.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 10:40:55 +0000

Maybe I am not following this carefully but the standard 'alternative' fingering for the C to B trill on a soprano recorder is T 2 (3) where the moving fingering, which starts up, is 3.

The fingering T (1) is the 'alternative' fingering for C# to B.

As for the T 23 being the 'piano' fingering, well that depends on the pressure you normally use for forte, mezzo and piano.

To be honest, on our Dolmetsch recorders we try to make the fingering T23 and T1 sound just about the same at mezzo pressure so that the player can use the 'alternative' trill fingering.

Forte and piano fingerings are only one way of changing pressure without changing pitch and I know that most recorder players only resort to alternative fingerings for dynamic changes on longer notes.

From: "Yvonne"
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 11:48:22 -0600

From what has been told to me, the T1 trill is preferred for baroque music because it is "wider", than the other trill and thus more exciting. The idea comes from Hotteterre's trill charts which have a lot of wide trills. At least this is what I was told when I also got "fussed at" by a good teacher for using the "common" alternative trill fingering for a-g (on alto.)

From: Glen Shannon
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 09:50:06 -0800

I'm just saying that I got into trouble using that trill in a masterclass and had to undergo a lecture about it. I didn't want to argue with Marion on stage in front of the entire recorder-playing population of the New World, but I still don't see why or how this easy solution would not have been noticed by players in the 18th century. I agree 100% that trilling on 3 on a T 23 fingering is certainly the way to go, I discovered it myself when I was about 15, trying to figure a way out of a finger-twister.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 15:13:35 +0000

The trouble with using historical fingering charts on modern recorders is that you don't actually know what tuning each fingering produces unless you know what instrument Hotteterre specified. Hotteterre might have written and had published recommended fingerings as did other players, teachers and makers, but who is to know where these worked, in the sense that they were what the player needed or thought he or she could 'get away with', and under what musical circumstances. If you read our web pages on historical recorder fingerings you will see that recorders were not standardized and that fingerings had to be modified according to practical circumstance.

The approach that says that tuning did not matter to French baroque performers, or that tuning meant something else entirely, beggars belief particularly when you review the vast amount of published discourse from this period on temperament, tuning and scale.

The trill T(1) for B to C is so clearly nonsense if one is trying to play in tune that whatever her reputation as a performer, I would certainly question her hearing. To say that it sounds like a semitone when it clearly sounds like a tone reminds me of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the 'Emperor's New Clothes'.

If we are to believe that French baroque performance allowed inaccuracy of a semitone in trilling (so that semitone trills could be played as tone trills, and, maybe, tone trills read as tone and a half tone trills) this calls into question the theory of harmony as applied to the music of this period the more so because no matter what freedom the solo performer might have in the matter, the keyboard players, once tuned, had little or none. Enharmonic fingering charts of the period for flutes and recorders seem surely to argue that they were very sensitive to intervals even smaller than a semitone.

From: Yvonne
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 17:29:42 -0600

Well, Dr. Blood, now you've got me thinking. (Which is always a good thing.) Your comments have generated several questions that maybe you or someone out there can answer - or at least point me in the direction of some other resources.

I understand what you are saying about tuning, historical vs.. modern recorders, etc. but, if playing wide trills in baroque music is such a terrible thing, why are many early music specialists promoting this view? And I'm talking about highly skilled and musical top level performers who really do have a excellent ear for tuning. It seems to be a standard baroque performance practice these days. And quite honestly, I have heard some of these performers both live and on recordings and not once been offended or dismayed that their trills were out of tune or a semi-tone too high. I have been experimenting with these wide trills and in many cases, depending on the mood of the music, I actually prefer the wide trill. Perhaps wide trills are more of a musical thing than an historical or accurate tuning thing? Of course, if this is truly the case, than the teachers should be saying such instead of justifying it with historical writings or charts.

Would you regard performances of the Flanders Recorder Quartet as "clearly nonsense", as you put it? I know for a fact, as I attended workshops at which they taught, that they use wide trills. In my humble opinion, it is ultimately the music that matters, not the history, accuracy or validity of technique - although these things certainly should be taken into account. In other words, if these trills make the music sound good, why not use them? Perhaps this whole discussion is about HIP vs HAP? (Warning: bad American joke: Its like Hip Hop for nerds -ha ha.)

Also, the teachers/performers who have told me about wide trills clearly know and can hear that the trills are not in tune or too high. They do say that these trills pass so quickly that the audience does not register their inaccuracy.

I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that someone somewhere has tried out the historical fingering charts on actual historical instruments. Which, as you pointed out, may not have been the exact type that Hotteterre and others used for their charts. But wouldn't this give a better idea of what was intended?

I did have a chance to peek into Hotteterre's "Principles of the Flute, Recorder..." today and found it interesting that in the flute part of the book, he makes several comments regarding tuning. For example, he says when using the flute fingering for high G-sharp, its a little high and that there are several ways of lowering it. So, why are these early music performers/teachers using Hotteterre as an example of wide trills? I'm sure these people have read the same passages as they are the ones who recommended the book! Are there other treatises that hint at wide trills out there? Surely there have been articles written on this subject? I'd be interested in reading any information that anyone can point to.

Happy to be always learning,

From: "Dan Chernikoff"
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 09:32:55 -0000

Well, I've never met Marion Verbruggen, but I'm in a 5-part group coached by Judy Linsenberg (the other professional that Glen said advocated the T1 trill) and I would NEVER question Judy's hearing, either face-to-face or behind her back! ;-) But seriously, Judy is ALWAYS concerned with playing in proper-pitch and is a remarkable recorder player (check out some of the CD's by her group, Musica Pacifica), so I give her words considerable weight.

Wasn't it Clea Galhano (another amazing recorder player) who said at a workshop that trills were "about dishonesty" or something like that? You start playing the notes slowly, in tune with the "proper" fingerings, and once you start moving faster you can switch to a less- perfect fingering for speed, and the audience literally doesn't hear the difference -- a trick of the human mind. Strange but true -- I've seen and heard it demonstrated...

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 10:17:50 +0000

Let us start with what the proponents recommend and why.

The wide trill movement seems to be based on ideas from 'gesture and effect' if I may steal two rhetorical terms, where tuning is relegated to a subsidiary position in the interests of musical drama.

I think that it is probably a dangerous thing to take aspects of performance from the opera and bring them into the music room where the audience is much closer to the 'musical' result and less taken up in the 'dramatic' moments that are the product of stage effects, elaborate costume and the general ridiculousness of most of the story line where 'suspension of disbelief' might indeed be stretched to details of harmonic integrity.

I could quite understand that in the general mayhem of a baroque opera stage fine details of tuning might indeed take third place or lower.

This is, in my opinion, not the point I am trying to make here.

We must surely nod in agreement with T.S. Eliot when he write: 'each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.'

Taking a detail from historical practice and applying it willy-nilly to situations where it is musically questionable calls into question our understanding of the reasons for the practice in the first place. To say weakly that many fine players do it does not make the case stronger anymore than winning an election gives a government a 'moral' right to do as it pleases.

The 'Bruggen bulge', now almost totally discredited, was at one time something almost no self-respecting recorder player with professional pretensions would leave out of his or her musical armoury. The fact that many said they liked it was still no guarantee of its long term acceptance either within the recorder world or beyond it.


>Would you regard performances of the Flanders Recorder Quartet as
>"clearly nonsense", as you put it? I know for a fact, as I attended
>workshops at which they taught, that they use wide trills. In my humble
>opinion, it is ultimately the music that matters, not the history,
>accuracy or validity of technique - although these things certainly
>should be taken into account. In other words, if these trills make the
>music sound good, why not use them? Perhaps this whole discussion is
>about HIP vs HAP? (Warning: bad American joke: Its like Hip Hop for
>nerds -ha ha.)

If I quote again how this subject was introduced:

It is with the suggestion that the ear 'hears' a semitone even though you and I know we are trilling a tone that I take issue. I don't think it is true now, nor was it likely to have been true in an age where every reasonably educated man or woman would have studied music and probably played tolerably well on some musical instrument.

As to the theorists, well how should we view them?

In early eighteenth century London, the coffee-houses were home to the dictators of taste, be it in art, music or literature. In other parts of Europe too, fads and fancies erupted from a hodge-podge of clerics, aristocrats, amateur critics and philosophers, the hangers-on at the legion of courts dotted about the land. Taste and your appreciation of what was good and what was bad, what was 'in' and what was 'out', would have a strong influence on your advancement for then, quite unlike now, advancement was through patronage.

Today, we can try to be far more dispassionate when looking at the fads and fancies of the past. There was seldom only one way of doing things even in the most highly regulated European court (just think of the struggle between Italian and French tastes in the late baroque court of France) and while it is interesting to try every idea, surely we are not thereby refused the freedom to question the reasonableness of any particular approach, to examine the result of any detail of performance practice, to criticize where the effect is a nonsense.

Are we to be reduced to the position of religious fundamentalism where nothing can be questioned and where everything must be taken to be the literal truth?

If this is the way of scholarship then let us have less scholarship and more music.

From: "Patrick McAvoy"
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 09:16:12 -0500

Yet Quantz reports violinists and oboists (namely Italian ones) occasionally trilling in thirds, a practice of which he did not approve for flute playing. Since Quantz in general disliked Italian playing, I imagine he really disliked the trill in thirds. But surely a third is even more "off" than a semitone? And people were using it, at least in Italy, and before 1750. By the late 17th/early 18th century, I am under the impression that most recorder players were oboists. So, perhaps, at least in Italy at a certain time, "wide" trills were part of a greater spectrum of shakes?

But then, what of the flattement, an ornament we usually, but not exclusively, associate with the French? Isn't the term "tremblement mineur" (I'm sure I spelled that wrong) often used as a synonym? Or have I misread? Does this suggest some sort of microtonal tuning system? I don't think so. I realize that the dip in the pitch is supposed to be very slight, but unless the flattement is used in the context of mezza di voce (which is certainly more viable on oboe than recorder...is it done at all on recorder?), the pitch invariably quivers by far less than a semitone.

I don't think anyone suggests all trills should be wide, but certainly depending on the situation, a perfect equal tempered semitone or tone (an anachronistic concept?) might not be fitting.

Finally, just as on flute and oboe, can't one "moderate the breath" on the false trills, as Quantz, et al. suggest? It works for me, even on recorder. They tend to sound "in tune" to me, but then again, perhaps I'm tone deaf.

I'm eager to learn of the flaws in my understanding of the matter.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 14:46:58 +0000

Of course, trills are not about anything, except trills. The way we finger them is where the 'dishonesty' appears to come in, although Galhano's flippancy is, in my opinion, an example of the lamentably modern trend towards verbal hysteria.

But, here we also have the mote that sticks in the eye:

The well established fingering T 2(3), which requires the least amount of 'dishonesty' being, as it is, pretty well perfectly in tune, is to be discarded in favour of a fingering T (1) which is seriously out of tune.

IMHO, not so much 'dishonesty' as 'eccentricity'.

From: Stephen Lee
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 09:53:25 -0600

And to muddy things further, there are those of us who grew up playing keyboards where trills are always (well ... someplace there's bound to be an exception) played in the key of that particular passage of music. So, in the key of D major, you could have a trill of F# - G, a half step; or E - F#, a whole step.

When the keyboard player takes up a wind instrument, it is the natural tendency to copy -- to the extent that physics and ergonomics allows -- what one would hear on the keyboard.

Keyboard players (and others, I suppose) are able to eliminate any disagreement about this by calling it a "tremolo"; thus making it impossible to "trill" in thirds; thus eliminating any debate about "trilling" in thirds. If we would only learn to creatively solve problems with vocabulary, we could, for example, eliminate all wars and engage in, as Anakin Skywalker put it, "aggressive negotiations".

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 16:56:51 +0000

Maybe we stray here. Quantz's dismissive comment about how 'formerly' Italian violinists and oboe players used a shake of a third, and that some still did, did not prevent him stating clearly that it should not be used for voice or instruments (unless it be on the bagpipe!). He says that a shake should occupy the interval of a tone or a semitone according to the mode and note from which the shake originates.

(I quote here from Arnold Dolmetsch's 1915 translation an extract of which is included in his book on The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries).

Quantz has a clear idea what he thinks the purpose of a trill should be, and that it's purpose is both harmonic and melodic.

Tosti offers eight kinds of shake in his 1723 'Opinioni' none of which is equivalent to the wide trill mentioned before although he distinguishes the major shake from the minor shake - the former spanning a tone, the latter spanning a semitone.

I quote these writers to show that shakes did have a clear purpose, that the purpose was harmonic as well as melodic, that there were expectations and that there were reasons for those expectations.

And, of course, writers made these expectations and their reasons clear on numerous occasions.


>But then, what of the flattement, an ornament we usually but not exclusively
>associate with the French?  Isn't the term "tremblement mineur" (I'm sure I
>spelled that wrong) often used as a synonym?

The association is taken from Hotteterre - your spelling is perfect!


>Or have I misread?  Does this
>suggest some sort of microtonal tuning system?  I don't think so.  I realize
>that the dip in the pitch is supposed to be very slight, but unless the
>flattement is used in the context of mezza di voce (which is certainly more
>viable on oboe than recorder...is it done at all on recorder?), the pitch
>invariably quivers by far less than a semitone.

This is a mechanical vibrato - so explaining it in terms of a series of distinct notes is unnecessary. The interval is small, just as with other kinds of vibrato.


>I don't think anyone suggests all trills should be wide, but certainly
>depending on the situation, a perfect equal tempered semitone or tone (an
>anachronistic concept?) might not be fitting.

According to the harmonic needs, you are correct.


>Finally, just as on flute and oboe, can't one "moderate the breath" on the
>false trills, as Quantz, et al. suggest?  It works for me, even on recorder.
>They tend to sound "in tune" to me, but then again, perhaps I'm tone deaf.
>
>I'm eager to learn of the flaws in my understanding of the matter.

The question arose from a suggested fingering for a semitone trill (written as a semitone trill C to B) which is actually the fingering for a tone trill C# to B.

For the semitone trill there is general agreement that a perfectly good fingering exists T 2(3).

According to Glen it has been suggested by another that the correct fingering, maybe the only correct fingering, would be T (1) which is actually the correct fingering to the C# to B trill.

In mitigation it is suggested either:
(i) that the audience can't tell the difference;
(ii) that the player can't tell the difference, or by inference
(iii) that the difference doesn't matter.

It has also been suggested that by raising finger 1 less or by moderating the breath the 'falseness' of the alternative fingering can be reduced.

If it makes sense to use incorrect fingerings where simple alternatives exist and then expect the player to correct the self-inflicted error by changing finger height or breath pressure, then maybe someone would like to give a performance of one of Handel's recorder sonatas where the same fingering is used for all the notes and all pitch changes are achieved by change of breath pressure.

That, it seems to me, makes just about as much sense.

From: "Dan Chernikoff"
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 01:26:21 -0000

Mercy, get up on the wrong side of the bed, Brian? A bit harsh, don't you think? Surely there's nothing wrong with a bit of creativity in one's communications -- be it calling trill fingering compromises "dishonest" or using the delightful phrase "verbal hysteria". Her meaning was clear, and nobody at that workshop believed she was inciting us all to lie and cheat, or impuning anyone's honesty or ethics. But perhaps it came across otherwise via my email, and if so my apologies.

You make a good point about T 2(3) being in better tune than T(1), although on my recorders, at least, the tone color of T 23 is very different and thus at least as jarring as the slightly out-of- tuneness of T1 which I personally feel blends in better. Maybe with better recorders I might think differently.

From: Rob Turner
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 19:38:34 -0500 (EST)

In the baroque era most professional-level recorder players were probably doublers, playing oboe or traverso. Both of these instruments use a wide, 'false' trill for the equivalent trill to the one we're discussing, and many other trills as well. Woodwind fingering charts of the period seem to show a clear bias FOR wide trills, for instance the f#-e trill on traverso, which is fingered f#, e, thereafter followed by a fingering that can give a pitch that is a very high g-flat.

Of course if one wants to play baroque music and sound like a modern orchestral player doubling on recorder, by all means the T23 fingering should be used, preferably in every instance of this trill... It would be silly for someone who is playing instruments with historical fingering to use this "modern" trill fingering, at least in most contexts.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 10:16:54 +0000

I am not a baroque traverso player but I wonder is there another possible trill fingering for f# - e which would not be wide but would provide equivalent convenience?

There are recorder trill fingerings which are wide but so far as I can remember none offers any practical alternative so that one either trills wide or not at all!


>Of course if one wants to play baroque music and sound like a modern
>orchestral player doubling on recorder, by all means the T23 fingering
>should be used, preferably in every instance of this trill..

But why should playing a perfectly practical trill fingering be described in such pejorative terms? Surely, if a trill fingering works both practically and musically there is no good reason not to use it. There appear to be relatively few trill fingering charts from the eighteenth century (according to Edgar Hunt) and to describe any fingering as being 'modern' bearing in mind how wide the variety of fingerings given in early fingering charts seems to beg many questions.


>It would be silly for someone who is playing instruments with historical fingering to
>use this "modern" trill fingering, at least in most contexts.

I assume that on a recorder made to play with historical fingerings the trill T 2(3) could be less good than T (1). Obviously, you are not suggesting that 'historical fingerings' are necessarily better than those recommended by the maker where the instrument is not made strictly after historical models or indeed is an original playing recorder.

I notice in Hunt that on some charts T 2 is not the recommended fingering for C (descant) or F (treble) so in such cases the trill fingerings we are discussing might produce a very different result.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 14:34:02 +0000


>In the baroque era most professional-level recorder players were probably
>doublers, playing oboe or traverso. Both of these instruments use a wide,
>'false' trill for the equivalent trill to the one we're discussing, and
>many other trills as well. Woodwind fingering charts of the period seem to
>show a clear bias FOR wide trills, for instance the f#-e trill on
>traverso, which is fingered f#, e, thereafter followed by a fingering that
>can give a pitch that is a very high g-flat.
>
>Of course if one wants to play baroque music and sound like a modern
>orchestral player doubling on recorder, by all means the T23 fingering
>should be used, preferably in every instance of this trill... It would be
>silly for someone who is playing instruments with historical fingering to
>use this "modern" trill fingering, at least in most contexts.

Further to the above which of us is going to be brave enough to tell Nick Lander that on his Recorder Fingering Page the recommended T 23 as the alternative for T 1 is wrong!!

Indeed all the standard fingering charts I have come across also recommend T 23 as a standard alternative on soprano or alto.

Where exactly on a historical fingering chart is the T (1) given for recorder C - B soprano or F - E alto trill?

Or is this a modern 'historical' invention?

From: "Patrick McAvoy"
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 11:14:54 -0500

I believe the notion comes (at least partially) from traverso and hautboy trill fingering charts and the idea that transposition up a minor third or a fourth from traverso or hautboy music was common. Haynes ('The Eloquent Oboe', 2001) suggests that this was done not just for reasons of range, but to map the placement of cross-fingerings in the music for one instrument onto the equivalent notes on recorder. For the C-B trill, the fingerings Haynes lists are from Hotteterre (1707, trill first finger), Freillon-Poncein (1700, trill first finger but hold finger 6, presumably to hold the instrument) and Anonymous (1715, same as F-P). The importance of preserving where the cross-fingerings lie in a piece is not purely for technical ease, but to preserve the piece's intended Affect. It would seem furthermore likely that perhaps similar false-trill fingerings would be used by wind players. Haynes says "the reason for using false trills (as Hotteterre explained) was greater clarity."

Then again, Hotteterre, Quantz, Loulie, etc. all suggest that trills should be kept in tune with embouchure/breath/finger technique. Yet I still think this makes false trills important because they suggest a desired (or at least expected) performance aesthetic. I referred to the flattement before because I don't think the historical players and theorists were just using cute terminology when they referred to it as a "lesser shake." I doubt this is my unique interpretation -- yes, it is a "mechanical vibrato," but since vibrato is an ornament in the baroque and not the constant "essential component of tone" of modern century practice, I don't see how this changes anything. Trills in general are "essential graces" as Quantz puts it. Flattement was considered both a "softening" and an intensifier. Everyone agrees, I think, that normal trills are intensifiers, but perhaps they could also be intended as "softenings" in certain contexts? I think that preference for false trills at the exclusion of otherwise perfectly good alternatives suggests that the desired trill aesthetic was that of subdued delicacy and clarity at least, e.g., in adagios. But that's just my guess. I'm certainly not a professional and I certainly could be bringing outside, "modern" ideas to the table.

"Better" fingerings do exist, e.g. for the f#-e trill, but tutors well into the classical era were using them. Granom's super-detailed traverso trill chart in his 1770 work (reproduced in facsimile in Boland's modern traverso tutor) still uses the wide fingering. It's not until Tromlitz in 1791 and the 19th century that the narrower, more "normal" fingering is used. Perhaps another reason why it wasn't prefered earlier is because the e-f# interval was too narrow in earlier instruments? Certainly in oboes, as one progresses later in time, we find f#'s that aren't as flat. I imagine something similar is true for flutes, but I'm only personally familiar with baroque models.

From: Rob Turner
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 12:28:32 -0500 (EST)

Patrick makes the point I was trying to make extremely well. I think that there are two aesthetics among recorder players playing baroque music today. One seeks to make the recorder sound as much like any other modern orchestral instrument as possible, and the other uses the recorder as a baroque instrument, drawing on the techniques used by baroque woodwind players who would have been called on to double on recorder.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:22:30 +0000

[Patrick's message] makes things a lot clearer even though I still have major reservations.

The first is the general principle of changing instrumentation when playing music from the baroque period.

I have a strong suspicion that 'copying' the 'effect' of the fingering on one instrument to that on another is a 'modern' concern.

First, on the traverso, the pitch of any fingering can be modified by variations in breath pressure and by lipping so that the exact 'width' of a trill can be varied probably more than on an oboe or a recorder. There is good evidence that 'lipping' was part of a baroque flautist's armory which, of course, has no equivalent on the oboe or on the recorder.

The next point is that even allowing for the unconscious results of a traverso player playing their recorder in a more 'traverso' way, and so on with any other pairing of wind instruments, there will be instrument exchanges where one is left wondering which is the 'leading instrument' - in other words, which instrument would mimic which. If I am used to wide trills on the flute (because that is all a flutist can do on that note) then taking up the recorder I might mimic them. However, if I start on the recorder where the trill need not be wide, why would I defer to a flautist's approach and if I wanted to play the same music on the violin why should the approach of any wind player be my concern?

The idea that oboists would want to play their recorders with fingerings drawn from oboe fingering charts, or recorder players theirs from traverso fingering charts seems, to me, very strange - rather like wanting to use 'cello fingering on a viola da gamba.

This all hints at an 'aesthetic' strongly at variance with those things that from contemporary writings we know were taken seriously, such as matters of technique, tuning systems, harmonic integrity and melodic shape. We have already pointed to Quantz' guidance on these points as they apply to trilling - and Quantz as much as anyone from this period, knew what French style was and what was done, and could be done, on a traverso.

If there really is no evidence that these things were done on the recorder, our discussion is just so much guesswork, where we are forced to pretend that we have found a 'concern' that worried someone from the eighteenth century and which leads us to undermine a perfectly good 'aesthetic' for which there is even better evidence and which appears to have been sustained through many centuries even to the present time.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:33:27 +0000


>Patrick makes the point I was trying to make extremely well. I think that
>there are two esthetics among recorder players playing baroque music
>today. One seeks to make the recorder sound as much like any other modern
>orchestral instrument as possible, and the other uses the recorder as a
>baroque instrument, drawing on the techniques used by baroque woodwind
>players who would have been called on to double on recorder.

Nice point but, of course, it is built on sand.

We have absolutely no idea how baroque instruments sounded in the eighteenth century - the sound of an instrument is set by the performer (a discussion we have flogged to death many time in this and other groups) - maybe as much as 80% of the sound is set by the player.

It is fashionable, here as in some many other places, to assume that if something does not sound 'modern' it must be early. I would refer you to the wonderful article in Early Music where the author compared recordings of contemporary music and 'early' music, decade by decade through the second half of the twentieth century, and showed, convincingly to me at least, how matters of tone, attack, timbre, tempo, etc. were exactly mirrored in the two genres.

The sound of 'early' music which can be only the sound of 'early' music that we choose to give it, is not a static, it is not based on better or worse evidence, but derives from our 'modern' taste - as this changes so the sound of our favorite 'early' music group changes also.

From: Blockflute1@aol.com
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:22:12 EST

I agree with Brian that we cannot know what music sounded like in the early periods but we can make informed speculations based on the writings especially the instructional texts of the time. Musicians who study their craft the same way as their early comrades will probably have a better chance of producing an historically correct sound than a modernly trained musician taking up recorder. Speculation, true but the theory is sound. I am not aware of anyone who is trying this method from scratch (young and musically untrained). Then again, having all the answers would certainly take all the fun out of it.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 14:32:56 +0000

The trouble is that we can read all the books there are and still not know how instruments sounded. If you read the instruction books written today you will see that the problem is just the same - we only know how modern instruments sound because we hear them about us. Words are no substitute for sound. The role of the instrument teacher includes the passing on of an 'aural' tradition from teacher to pupil, the tradition of a 'correct' or 'acceptable' sound.

I recommend you read an article entitled Do early music interpretations improve? by Todd McComb.

Todd, like every other writer I have read on this subject, falls into the same trap as you.

He writes:

"Interpretive choices made by performers from decade to decade retain a large component of fashion, but there are also a couple of objective reasons that interpretations of Medieval & Renaissance music have improved, at least in some sense: 1) Our understanding of what the old musical notation means has improved. Real misunderstandings have been rectified regarding the marks on the paper; ideas on choosing accidentals in polyphony and rhythms in unmeasured music have developed; the basic theory, tunings, and ensemble constitutions have been uncovered. In some cases it has been a matter of taking early theorists seriously (e.g. Pythagorean tuning), instead of believing the music must have sounded more like later music. 2) Performers have had more opportunity to hear the music as performed by others, to internalize it and gain a personal feeling for it. No matter what one's interpretive stance on Beethoven might be, any performer has had ample opportunity to hear Beethoven's music performed, for it to seem real, for an interpretation to concentrate fully on expression rather than on feeling one's way in the dark."

Innocently, he sees improvement coming in part from the greater opportunity we have to hear the music performed by others - not, notice, to hear the music performed by those from the period in which it was written. We have greater security from having absorbed the naturalness of 'modern' interpretations of 'early music'.

This is false comfort if all we are saying is that 100 guesses are better than 1 guess. These are still only guesses and, more to the point, we are now all so certain that what we 'hear' IS the 'sound' early instruments made when heard many centuries ago that the fallacy is difficult to appreciate.

From: "Sven Hoja"
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 16:33:01 +0100

The Beethoven example reminds me of a visit / performance at a piano museum: The difference of the sound of a modern grand piano and its original predecessors of the Mozart / Beethoven era is so great even for the less trained listener that it is obvious that Beethoven *must* have had another imagination of sound than we have today. Regarding a modern performance, more than 'informed speculation' can't consequently be expected.

From: Blockflute1@aol.com
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 10:59:23 EST

But for the same reason, we will never know what was the color of a Tyrannosaurus rex. But that does not prevent museums and toy companies from creating likenesses of same. Disregarding the large purple ones that talk, we see them in the museums and on the screen and for a time anyway we believe what we are seeing is real (or at least correct) without reflecting too much.

Of course we will never know what the music sounded like to those people so rely on scholars to make their best guesses. And like in scientific questions we rely on the base of knowledge growing and that the best guesses are always getting closer to the fact.

From: Stephen Lee
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 11:34:04 -0600

If I may interject a view from the cheap seats.

It seems that now days, much of THE WAY something should be performed or THE WAY it should sound evolves from and is propagated by universities. I have to ask: What was the average education level of the "typical" musician "back then"? Could the majority of them even read? I would note that, as we get back to the pre-baroque era, I think the most famous composer is Anonymous.

What is interesting is the apparent hefty effort in determining the sound of early performance when, in cases where do have a good idea of what the sound was -- such as the organs on which Bach played -- we ignore it and play it with the sound we prefer. It seems like when we don't know what the sound was, we speculate on what it was and attempt to match it. When we DO know what the sound was, we don't care and do what we want.

From: Charles Fischer
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 10:25:42 -0800

Well, not quite. Leonhardt and Koopman (among others) have made many Bach organ recordings using Silberman and other organs that Bach played on as well as contemporary organs. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, Frans Bruggen made a seriew of recordings for Telefunken using historical recorders, most of which had the original blocks and a few of which had new blocks made for them. Starting then, makers such as Martin Skowronek, Friedrich von Huene, and Fred Morgan began making baroque recorders based on these historical instruments and in 1971/72 Bob Marvin starting producing consorts of renaissance recorders based very closely on instruments he measured in Vienna. The legacy of these pioneers has extended to such contemporary recorder makers as Jean-Luc Boudreau, Adriana Breukink, Adrian Brown, Jacqueline Sorel, Ralf Ehlert, Michael Grinter, Peter van der Poel, Hans Schimmel, Heinz Amman, Hirao, Ture Bergstrom, Tim Cranmore and others so that now it is possible to buy a recorder that closely resembles the instruments in museums and private collections in both appearance and sound. A similar blossoming has occurred for traversos, baroque oboes, violins, violas da gamba, harpsichords, fortepianos, chamber organs, lutes, etc.

The Leonhardt Consort and the Concentus Musicus Wien string and wind players started using original string and wind instruments to produce sounds that would not be unfamiliar to 18th century ears, including the first natural horn recordings of the Mozart Horn Concertos, with its characteristic open and closed tones. What has changed over the last 40 years (for the better IMO) is that the level of playing ability on these instruments has improved in terms of tone, intonation and interpretive expression, based both on scholarship and an increased level of familiarity with the sound worlds of these instruments.

The reductio ad absurdum argument "we can never REALLY know how the music was originally played and sounded - therefore anything goes as long as it is musical" holds little weight for me. HIP performances, as a class, sound distinctly different from 19th/20th century instruments and styles playing baroque pieces. Are all HIP performances equally valid or equally good? Certainly not..there are differences in interpretation, taste, and ability among HIP performers as much as among modern performers, but I will find myself searching among the HIP performances for my listening pleasure (or displeasure) rather than Raymond Leppard, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, I Musici, Helmuth Rilling, Orchestra of St. Lukes, or (and this one is the absolute worst) Cantilena.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 10:06:17 +0000


>Of course we will never know what the music sounded like to those people so
>rely on scholars to make their best guesses. And like in scientific questions
>we rely on the base of knowledge growing and that the best guesses are always
>getting closer to the fact.

This is beginning to sound like an article of faith. Science has nothing to do with this - the problem is not scientific, it is aesthetic - and the scientific method cannot be applied to aesthetic questions. We just don't know whether the best guesses are the best, nor how close to the fact they actually are. In fact, we probably cannot decide even what is 'best'. We know what we like, and from the plethora of modern interpretations available we can make informed choices - decide which one we feel comfortable with. The problem with trying to determine the 'appropriate' historical sound, and its creation, is that the judgment 'which sound was appropriate' can only be made by someone living when the music was originally written.

As someone who is amazed when at musical instrument exhibitions just how many different sounds people can produce on an individual 'modern' recorder and also just how many different examples of 'exact copies of original flutes and recorders' you can buy all derived from a single original lying in a museum this problem may be something with which I am more familiar.

The sound an woodwind , brass or stringed 'instrument' makes is basically the sound with which the player is comfortable. Organs, where we know they have survived unaltered, may be just about the only instruments where we have a good idea of an original sound.

Todd McComb is right when he points to our better understanding of the marks of the page, what they mean and how they might have been realized in performance but in matters of sound we are now and will remain forever trapped in the present and subject to the fashions of the moment.

This is not a reason for not wanting to perform early music - after all most of us do this a lot of the time - and I would be the first to suggest trying to perform on the correct instruments and at the correct pitch and with some regard to what historical information we have to hand.

But I believe that we must learn to be honest about what we can know and what we cannot. No amount of wishful thinking will fill the evidential holes that by the very nature of historical evidence we have to accept.

From: "Knut Barde"
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 22:56:25 -0800

I beg to differ that science has nothing to do with the question discussed. The various aesthetic considerations, the physical evidence of the instruments, the comments and writings of contemporaries, all of these and many more factors are not jumbled in a chaotic mess, but are assembled, reassembled, tested, analyzed, hypothesized about, subjected to critical thinking, etc. All of that is scientific activity that goes far beyond a mere opinion of whether a person prefers white chocloate over milk chocolate, or any other personal/trivial opinion that is outside of verification/falsification/critical analysis, etc. There are rules of the game to be obeyed when discussing the question, it is not an anything goes affair.

To the extent that aesthetic sensibilities are universally present in human societies, expressed in diverse forms and media, aesthetics are as much subject to scientific analysis as are all other forms of human activity. By drawing the curtain of a purported inscrutability over those areas of human life that either divide or unite us, such as art, music, religion, political orientations, etc. we merely further the aims of all those who want to play their manipulative games in these arenas because they have in fact found some patterns, some regularities, some organization, that can be exploited with results that are not pure chance. There are the beginings of a science here. To segregate aesthetics into the solipsistic morass of the purely personal negates the evidence of ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural evolution, biology, ethnography, psychology, etc.

Arriving at ever closer approximations of the truth is very much a scientific endeavor. Not having 100% certainty is no reason not to search for, embrace, and recognize the 100-x% propability when it can be had.

If an educated guess is all we can get, then that educated guess has more claim to legitimacy than a random gamble. In that sense, the educated guess is scientific, and the random guess is not.

By limiting the ballgame to a certain range of probable authentic sound or performance practice, and excluding from that range all for which there is no evidence, we have done science, and have not merely performed an excercise in the creation of personal opinion, that by necessity would have to be trivial because devoid of any connection to anything outside the person, i.e. evidence. When we have evidence, apply reasoning powers to the evidence, and communicate about the process, we are advancing knowledge, i.e. we are doing science.

Let's not concede the realm of science to the atomsmashing physicists and the physical sciences alone.

From: "Dr. Brian Blood"
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 12:52:15 +0000

I would like to further this discussion by quoting (at some length) from Isaiah Berlin's Introduction to the Mentor Philosophers Series "The Age of Enlightenment" firstly because I have yet to read anything on this subject written in a clearer or more approachable way and secondly because, as I see things, it sets out the problem I believe we face when attempting to find answers to aesthetic questions.

"Philosophical problems arise when men ask questions of themselves or of others which, though very diverse, have certain characteristics in common. These questions tend to be very general, to involve issues of principle, and to have little or no concern with practical utility. But what is even more characteristic of them is that there seem to be no obvious and generally accepted procedures for answering them, nor any class of specialists to whom we automatically turn for the solutions. Indeed there is something peculiar about the questions themselves; those who ask them do not seem any too certain about what kind of answers they require, or indeed how to set about finding them. To give an illustration: if we ask "Have any ravens been seen in Iceland in 1955?" we know how to set about answering such a question - the correct answer must obviously be based on observation, and the naturalist is the expert to whom we can appeal. But when men ask questions like "Are there any material objects in the universe (or does it, perhaps, consist rather of minds and their states)?" what steps do we take to settle this? Yet outwardly there is a similarity between the two sentences. Or again, supposing I ask "Did the battle of Waterloo take place in the seventeenth century?" we know how to look for the relevant evidence, but what are we to do when asked "Did the universe have a beginning in time?" We know the answer to "Are you certain that he knows you?" But if someone wonders "Can I ever be quite certain about what goes on in the mind of another?" how do we satisfy him? It is easy to reply to "Why is Einstein's theory superior to Newton's?" than to "Why are the predictions of scientists more reliable than those of witch doctors (or vice versa)?", or to "How many positive roots are there of the equation square(x) = 2?" than to "Are there irrational numbers?", or to "What is the exact meaning of the word 'obscurantist'?" than to "What is the exact meaning of the word 'if'?". "How should I mend this broken typewriter?" seems different in kind from "How should I (or men in general) live?".

In each case the attempt to answer the second question of the pair somehow seems to encounter an obstacle. There is not, as there is for the first member of the pair, a well-attested, generally accepted, method of discovering the solution. And yet questions of this kind seem definite enough, and have proved, to some men, very puzzling and indeed tormenting. Why, then, is there such difficulty in arriving at answers which settle the matter once and for all, so that the problems do not crop up afresh in each generation? This failure to provide definite solutions creates the impression that there is no progress in philosophy, merely subjective differences of opinion, with no objective criteria for the discovery of the truth.

The history of such questions, and of the means employed to provide the answers is, in effect, the history of philosophy. The frame of ideas within which, and the methods by which, various thinkers at various times try to arrive at the truth about such issues - the very ways in which the questions themselves are construed - change under the influence of many forces, among them answers given by philosophers of an earlier age, the prevailing moral, religious and social beliefs of the period, the state of scientific knowledge, and, not least important, the methods used by scientists of the time, especially if they have achieved spectacular successes, and have, therefore, bound their spell upon the imagination of their own and later generations.

One of the principal characteristics of such questions - and this seems to have become clearer only in our own day - is that, whatever else they may be, they are neither empirical nor formal; that is to say, philosophical questions cannot be answered by adducing the results of observation or experience, as empirical questions, whether of science or of common sense, are answered. Such questions as: "What is the supreme good?" Or "How can I be sure that your sensations are similar to mine? Or that I ever genuinely understand what you are saying, and do not merely seem to myself to do so?" cannot be, on the face of it, answered by either of the two great instruments of human knowledge: empirical investigation on the one hand, and deductive reasoning as it is used in the formal disciplines on the other - the kind of argument which occurs, for example, in mathematics or logic or grammar.

Indeed it might almost be said that the history of philosophy in its relation to the sciences, consists, in part, in the disentangling of these questions which are either empirical (and inductive) , or formal (and deductive), from the mass of problems which fill the minds of men, and the sorting out of these under the heads of the empirical or formal sciences concerned with them. It is in this way that, for instance, astronomy, mathematics, psychology, biology, etc. became divorced from the general corpus of philosophy (of which they once formed a part), and embarked upon fruitful careers of their own independent disciplines. They remain with the province of philosophy only so long as the kinds of way in which their problems were to be settled remained unclear, and so were liable to be confused with other problems with which they had relatively little in common, and from which their differences had not been sufficiently discerned. The advance both of science and of philosophy seems bound up with this progressive allocation of the empirical and formal elements, each to its own proper sphere; always, however, leaving behind a nucleus of unresolved (and largely unanalyzed) questions, whose generality, obscurity and, above all, apparent (or real) insolubility by empirical or formal methods, gives them a status of their own which we tend to call philosophical.

Realization of this truth (if it be one) was a long time in arriving. The natural tendency was to regard philosophical questions as being on a level with other questions, and answerable by similar means; especially be means which had been successful in answering these other questions, which in fact did turn out to be either empirical or a priori, even though the distinction between the two was not always consciously drawn. When some branch of human inquiry, say physics or biology, won notable successes by employing this or that new and fertile technique, an attempt was invariably made to apply analogous techniques to philosophical problems also, with results, fortunate and unfortunate, which are a permanent element in the history of human thought. Thus the unprecedented success of the mathematical method in the seventeenth century left a mark on philosophy at this time, but because mathematical techniques - deduction from 'self-evident' axioms according to fixed rules, tests of internal consistency, a priori methods, standards of clarity and rigor proper to mathematics - were applied to philosophy also, with the result that this particular model dominates the philosophy as well as the natural science of the period. This led to notable successes and equally notable failures, as the over-enthusiastic and fanatical application of techniques rich in one field, when mechanically applied to another, not necessarily similar to the first, commonly does. If the model that dominated the seventeenth century was mathematical, more particularly that of the Newtonian system, that is everywhere imitated in the century that followed. Philosophical questions are in fact sui generis unique, and resemble questions of mechanics no more closely than those of mathematics (or of biology or psychology or history); nevertheless the effect upon philosophy of one model is very different from that of another."

Berlin makes a clear distinction between questions to which the scientific method may be profitably applied (the profit being in the value of the answer) and those where the method although superficially attractive has nothing or even worse than nothing to offer.

And yet the temptation is great. Faced with the undoubted success of the scientific method, we see many 'philosophers' trying to reconstruct 'philosophical' questions to no other end than the hope that the scientific method might be applied.

As an interesting example, I recommend Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction - a social critique of the judgement of taste".

In his introduction Bourdieu writes:

"Sociology endeavors to establish the conditions in which the consumers of cultural goods, and their taste for them, are produced, and at the same time to describe the different ways of appropriating such of these objects as are regarded at a particular moment as works of art, and the social conditions of the constitution of the mode of appropriation that is considered legitimate. But one cannot fully understand cultural practices unless 'culture', in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into 'culture' in the anthropological sense, and the elaborate taste for the most refined objects in reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavors of food."

In the future we might look more closely at Bourdieu's thesis but for present I want to point to the 'reclassification' of linguistic terms, in this case 'culture' and 'taste', to force the problem into a form that might be amenable to the scientific method. I would argue that in doing so the whole of language is forced into a 'rationality' that I suspect it may not have in theory and certainly does not have in practice, rather like the observation of Vincenzo Galilei that although musicians of the Italian Renaissance subscribed to the aesthetic rules set out by the Greeks and reiterated by Boethius, they did not observe them in practice but followed their own 'tastes' which were different.

Again I would argue that 'taste' is intrinsically personal even when, in a social setting, individuals give the appearance of subscribing to a social norm. This is analogous to observing that [eighteenth century] French Catholics probably went to church on Sundays and Feast Days and would have been expected to publically subscribe to the laws of the Church. In their daily lives, however, they must have failed often to live up to their avowed intentions. Not only did they sin but they sinned in wholly individual and private ways.

These considerations are important because what should interest us is not what history can tell us about the beliefs which artists and audiences of any earlier period professed, but what they actually did, what they actually thought and how what they saw and what they heard actually moved them. We want to know about their hearts as well as their heads. What is more, we have to do this allowing for a plurality of response, for differences of opinion, for the scope of sensibility, because if we assume people behave as a mass because we can only understand them as a mass, we will never be able to understand properly the richness of the world they created and in which they lived.

Returning to Berlin, and his article "The Apotheosis of The Romantic Will", we have to escape from the narrowness of the Platonic view that

(1) to all genuine questions there is one and only one true answer;

(2) the true answers to such questions are in principle knowable;

(3) that these true answers cannot clash with one another; for one true proposition cannot be incompatible with another.

It is these questions to which the scientific method can be applied but, as the Romantic philosophers drawing on the writings of Rousseau, Johnson, Burke and Herder onward were to argue, there are questions about man that cannot be answered in this narrow, formal way.

Having introduced the problem philosophically, I would now turn to examining the problem historically.

Hegel was one of the first to argue that history was not susceptible to the methods of empirical observation. Tolstoy, although he found Hegel's writing unintelligible, and unlike his contemporary Karl Marx, saw that if history was a science, and if a set of laws could be discovered and formulated, then one could make predictions of the future and fill in any 'evidential' gaps from the past, through retrodiction.

Tolstoy rejected this possibility in the epilogue of War and Peace: "If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.'

Tolstoy recognized the arbitrariness of historical evidence, how historians tend to reduce life to its economic or political skeleton, how they must rely on those things that can survive through time, be they documents or monuments, and how when they come to write their books, they can provide only new 'prejudices' drawn from the 'prejudices' of the past.

This does not mean, of course, that we have no knowledge, no evidence, or that the past is totally lost to us; only that in deciding which is good and which is bad, we are forced to make modern judgements, judgements informed by the vagaries of the historical process to be sure, but based on our experience, our passions and our 'good taste' even though we believe they relate to what we understand, or judge, or hope the past to be.

The Story of a Trilledited by Brian Blood

The Story of a Trill
edited by Brian Blood