Classical Breathing
I usually don’t listen to much classical music. but yesterday morning was that kind of day. it was Warm in this second week of December. you could walk barefoot onto a porch and feel just mighty fine as you please.
some kind of string orchestra was playing away when something I never had noticed came sliding out of the radio into my mind’s ear. Maybe I heard something completely different, but I swear that this what I heard: the sound of the player breathing during the viola solo.
Every several seconds, the curved and crisp sound of a quick inhalation
(//h-h-h)
Quiet. It was not unlike to the sound of a persons fingers sliding along the metal strings of an acoutic guitar. but not that sound at all. It was was the sound of air. these short stacatto bursts of smooth and transparent breaths. with the volume cranked so high, it sounded like wind in the kitchen.
Viola players, am I wrong?
If I am, maybe don’t tell me.
posted by andrew s.yang at Thursday, December 09, 2004
2 Comments:
You are not wrong. String players often use breathing to keep time, especially to cue other players or themselves. For instance, in chamber music the first violin of a quartet will inhale very loudly and nod at the other players so they know when to start/come in.
Was it your birthday and I missed it?
Erika
trust the music major to weigh in on this one... and weigh in i shall.
yes, you often can hear an intake of breath in art music solos. i think cellists in particular are notorious for it (OK, singers too, but really, that's a given)--there is often much snorting and so forth in the background of a cello solo. my piano teachers often talked with me about singing lines, allowing pause for processing and thought, like commas in sentences, and sometimes i think it can help the performer to actually do it physically through breath--it adds emotional weight and complexity to the performance.
i think (although i am not too familiar with it) that there has been some academic work done on gesture and meaning in music: the way how one plays an instrument affects the music that result. i've also noticed in listening to various albums that different albums will have different esthetics in terms of how much you hear or don't hear the mode of sound production (whether you hear the singer's intake of breath, the sound of the pick on the guitar, the grate of the bow on the strings, and so forth).
and one last thought: for me, when playing piano there is always this distance, remove, between me and the instrument; while when i play guitar and i'm holding my instrument in my hands, feeling the vibrations through the back of the guitar into my belly, it feels much more like i'm using an extension of my self. and when i sing...well, that's me.
--robin
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