Barry wrote
I trust there is a tongue in cheek element here.
Well spotted, Barry! (-;
Among the reasons I have chosen to attempt a detached style of playing is that I feel that it allows more control of the rhythm.
There is now sense and moderation in the discussion. We have achieved a result!
As John, Barry again and finally Chris have emphasised, it's all to do with expressing the music, and having the technique to do it justice. The Miles Davis references completely reinforce this - I don't know much about jazz, but I think one of Davis's greatest skills was total control over articulation so that he could express the music with whatever subtlety he wanted - the trumpet was a totally flexible voice. To bring my own early-music speciality to bear - this ties in completely with the Renaissance wind instrumentalist's ideal of imitating the human voice. They believed that as God made the human voice, it was the perfect instrument, and the duty of all other instruments was to imititate vocal expressiveness as far as possible. Jazz playing preserves this idea into the modern age far more than classical technique does. The treatises on playing "divisions" (very like NSP variation sets) which survive from the turn of the 16th/17th century - e.g. Dalla Casa's book published Venice 1584, intended primarily for cornetto, which he played in St Mark's, but also relevant for recorder (and whistle or even trumpet?) - start with pages of articulation exercises on different syllables le-re-le-re, de-re-le-re, ter-re-te-re, te-re-le-re, te-che-te-che... etc. The most successful technique when playing this music is not to actually slur anything, but try to get a variety of separately articulated notes ranging from ALMOST slurred to quite staccato. Listen to a recording of a really good cornetto player, like Bruce Dickey, to hear the effect - very like Miles Davis's trumpet in fact. Moving forward to the Baroque period, where actual slurring is often required; in say Vivaldi or a Handel recorder or flute sonata there will be pages of semiquaver runs, but with no written slurs - at that time the composers hardly ever put them in. If played all equally tongued, there is no shape to the phrasing and it sounds like machine-gun fire. The player has to decide which notes to slur, and which to tongue gently or combine in "tu-ru" or "diddle-diddle" type tonguings, and which to separate quite distinctly. Slurring two or more notes together always gives the effect of a slight accent on the first of the group. Nearly every note can be slightly different in length from its neighbours - and so this sort of music is given life and interest, which it doesn't have when just seen as an endless stream of notes. With pipes, there's no tongue (or bow) to do all this, hence gracing on all open-ended pipes and detatched fingering on closed-end pipes, or those like the musette which have closed fingering and the illusion of separated notes. I don't claim to be much of a Northumbrian piper - no Barry, it won't be worth spending money on petrol to hear me play the pipes, but I don't mind you hearing me play the recorder :-) but when I play the pipes, I try to use the detached fingering as far as I can to get the differing lengths of notes needed to point the rhythm and try to express the tunes. Players like Chris do it, and I can't - but it's far from being a universally staccato effect. Sometimes in the Great Debate, I was afraid that people were demanding EVERYTHING had to be very staccato, or it wasn't proper Northumbrian piping.
Sorry about the long rambling! Philip To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
