The Vibrato on the Violin Part 1

Many people think vibrato on the violin is kind of a mystery, something that is a restricted area only for advanced players. I can assure you, that’s not the case.
Of course, you have to acquire a certain reliability when it comes to intonation since vibrato is nothing else than a controlled manipulation of the tone’s frequency. But generally we should start with it quite early in our career to get used to the movements we need to produce a pleasant sound.

In the past centuries the way of playing the violin has changed significantly. In this series I will narrow down to the technical aspects because there are other – and better – publications dealing with this topic. But one thing is important:
Vibrato is a stylistic device. And as much as other stylistic features are influenced and developed continuously, the same happens to the vibrato.

If we listen to older records by Heifetz, Menuhin, Enescu etc. we can hear sometimes huge differences to records of nowadays. Not only the tones on which vibrato was applied have changed. Also the technical way, the frequeny, the amplitude were different.
Probably we will never achieve the same quality as Heifetz. But if you compare him with, let’s say, Shlomo Mintz you’ll notice an entirely different sound. Which has nothing to do with Mintz’ quality. Heifetz was at his peak decades before Mintz, and musical taste has changed significantly since then.

You can hear the same phenomenon if you compare opera records of Maria Callas with records of 2000 and later. Nobody would try to copy Callas’ voice because our musical taste is different.

What exactly is a Vibrato?

Vibrato is an attempt to imitate the human voice and it’s oscillation.
In this series we’ll look into the most common vibrato on the violin: The vibrato of the left hand.
Obviously, a vibrato is a controlled change of frequency of the tone played. Or in other words, the tone oscillates around the basic, the mean tone, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, similar to a sine wave:

The y-axis presents the frequency, the x-axis shows the time. The x-axis itself is the mean tone.

The common doctrine says we have to oscillate around the mean tone. The tone has to be in the middle, more or less. An exception is Galamian’s approach to this problem. He wants us to place our finger a bit higher and then vibrate downwards, something which I personally do not like because it complicates the whole procedure and doesn’t improve the sound result greatly.

In the next part we’ll look at the terms frequency and amplitude which have entirely different meanings when we look at the physical aspects on the one hand and the movements on the other.

Technorati Tags:
Left Hand, Vibrato, Violin Lessons