The Great Italian Maestro Carlo
Maria Giulini used to tell the members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Orchestra in his thick Italian accent: “My friends, please don’t confuse
dynamic with intensity”; I’ve been thinking about those wise words for the last
30 years.
The dictionary defines intensity
as a measurement of energy, but regarding music it needs to be a little more
defined. Of course, just a measurement of energy would include the difference between loud and soft; certainly,
dynamic is a measurement of energy, but
for the purpose of this article I will refer to dynamic as the amplitude, the
loud and soft of music, and intensity as the ratio of harmonics; that is tone
quality.
The nature of sound as we play,
speak, or sing, normally increases with intensity when the dynamic increases,
and in piano it decreases. For example, compare the soft timbre of a sweet lullaby
compared to the hard aggressive quality of a rock and roll singer. However, it
doesn’t necessacerely have to be that way, there is much more to sound than
just dynamic variety.
Luciano Pavarotti, for example,
was able to sing very softly with great intensity, and a great actor can speak
a text in a very soft voice, even a whisper but with frightening intensity;
some of the most terrible villains in film and theater speak in a menacingly
intense soft voice.
Intensity can be the regulator
of our musical quality; a pianissimo with no intensity is a weak, often
unstable sound, which is nearly impossible to play with regarding intonation.
And a fortissimo with too much intensity can simply be ugly.
In playing music we have both
dynamics and intensity as our tools
of expression, balancing the two leads toward a much richer sonic vocabulary; it’s
important to use them both and not to
confuse them.
Part of our job as brass
players, as well as maintaining our techniques of fingers, breathing,
articulation, and embouchure control, is to be aware of that chronic balance
calibration between dynamic and energy and to make our personal decision for
the correct mix for the correct occasion. But particularly, as lower brass
players we need to formulate our opinion as to whether the bass notes, the tuba
notes, those that are required in most of our playing, should simply be a big
sound with wide amplitude to put a basic bottom on a brass section, or to
calculate an energy to that sound that is more homogeneous with the higher
brasses. I won’t offer an opinion regarding this but I will only say that I
have been fascinated by this question for my full playing career. We, with the
help of the people we work with, have a choice. Certainly, the correct solution
will very from person to person as well as through diverse styles and
repertoire. Personally, I recommend keeping an open mind and continuing the
search for that correct calibration, the correct mix; it’s more interesting
than staying with the comfortable and predictable. Sound is part of our
musicality and musicality is a growing aspect that needn’t ever stop evolving.
Enjoy this search.
August 29, 2009, Tokyo
Reissued October 25, 2012
