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Date: | Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:13:18 -0800 |
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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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