Ed Zubrow wrote:

> Lastly, I discovered that he believed that on rare occasions *silence*
> can produce color.  How?  In Salome he writes low notes for the violin
> that are not playable.  (They are being doubled elsewhere in the orchestra,
> but they are written into the violins' line as well.) Norman Del Mar
> explains in Anatomy of the Orchestra: "in his more patient moments he
> [Strauss] would explain that if the player *thought* the unobtainable
> note strongly enough and tried hard to look as if he *was* playing it,
> the audience would never know it was missing."

I suspect "Big Norman" was indulging in a bit of a leg pull.  I'm sure
he would have been familiar with the discussion (in the 1958 Hoffnung
Interplanetary Festival) of Bruno-Heinz Jaja's Punkt Kontrapunkt, in
which, among many other things (and I shall not attempt to produce the
German accents of Hoffnung or Amis)

   "...the silence makes a crescendo, as it is the only moment
   in the whole work when every instrument has the mute off.
   In fact there is even more of a crescendo as the bratsche
   - or viola as you call it - has a bottom B flat marked
   'tremolando, ma quasi pensato'.

   "They must not play this note, only think it. In fact they
   can only think it, as the bottom B flat is not on the
   instrument".

Coincidence? As far as I can tell his book was first published in 1981.

|Deryk Barker
|email: [log in to unmask]

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