Flute Vibrato Pt 3

Use of Vibrato in Classical Music

Folk music instrumentalists and singers rarely or never use vibrato. In fact, this technique tends only to be used for the so-called “art music”, or for the performance of transcriptions by musician from a classically-trained background.

Although vibrato is usually thought of as an effect added onto the note itself, in some cases it is so fully a part of the style of the music that it can be very difficult for some performers to play without it. Still, the use of vibrato in classical music is a matter of some dispute. For much of the 20th century it was used almost continuously in the performance of pieces from all eras from the baroque onwards. A drastic change in approach took place with the rise of “historically informed performance” from the 1970s onwards.

For example, an interesting observation is that, occasionally, composers up to the baroque period indicated vibrato with a wavy line in the sheet music, which strongly suggests the effect was not desired for the rest of the piece.

However, there is no actual proof that musicians performed without vibrato in the baroque era.

At any rate, vibrato is not a modern invention. It began as an ornament, usually produced by the fingers, and only occasionally by the breath. Vibrato as we know it today — a more or less continuous pulsation or shimmer in the tone — originated in the late nineteenth century in Paris. Paul Taffanel and oboist Fernand Gillet were two of the instigators. This may seem surprising in view of the statement in the famous method by Taffanel & Gaubert:

There should be no vibrato or any form of quaver, an artifice used by inferior instrumentalists and musicians. It is with the tone that the player conveys the music to the listener. Vibrato distorts the natural character of the instrument and spoils the interpretation, fatiguing quickly the sensitive ear. It is a serious error and show unpardonable lack of taste to use these vulgar methods to interpret the great composers.

The advent of vibrato in France, around 1905, was the fuel for a great debate. Because it was new, it was often not done very well and was used indiscriminately, and so it got a bad name. Furthermore, flutists had sought for too long, not without difficulty, to find good tone in all registers that was pure, stable and flexible, not to conceive of this perfection as the height of their art.

Vibrato was later brought to the United States by flutists Georges Barrère and Georges Laurent, and by 1940 it had become an accepted part of American orchestral woodwind performance.