When we apply vibrato on an instrument like the violin or viola we must be aware that this vibrato always has to be intentional. It is never a matter of mere coincidence or even boredom. We use vibrato to manipulate our sound as intended.
It’s rather difficult to vibrate faster notes, often it’s impossible for technical reasons. We’ll leave out those passages. In addition, these fast notes are so short that they are even finished before we have completed an entire vibrato oscillation, thus resulting in an off-key note. So let’s concentrate on the longer notes.
As I already mentioned here we must learn to vibrate pointedly. To train this we chose an easier Etude by Pracht or Wohlfahrt like this one:
When we practise this we have to be sure to vibrate every single quarter note. On the eighth notes we suppress our vibrato. Through this we learn to apply the vibrato exactly when we want to, not accidentally, which is very important as we’ll see later in this series.
Feel free to experiment with those sorts of Etudes. The more you train the better you get. There are loads of Etudes appropriate for that.
But remember – you do that because you want to improve your vibrato. So you must apply vibrato! Your vibrato won’t get better by reading, only by playing.
If you are happy with that we go one step further. A huge step, though.
Our vibrato developes to a real stylistic device only if we are able to adjust frequency and amplitude. We also call that intensity. The faster and larger we move the more intense we get.
Here your have an exercise for that, but don’t start this unless you managed the previous one:
The intensity changes the same way we change our dynamic. They are directly related to each other in this exercise. The higher the volume the higher the intensity.
Best is to start piano with an up-bow and almost no vibrato. As soon as you get louder you increase your vibrato intensity as well. When you play the decrescendo you also diminish the intensity to almost nil.
The result will be an amazingly impressive crescendo which you cannot achieve by bowing technique alone.
