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] *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html