[Harp-L] The singing barbarian

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

While intonation may or may not be a killer issue with playing the
diatonic harmonica chromatically, the issue of timbre deserves some
perspective.

It's true that differences in timbre among bent, overbent, and default
notes cannot be entirely blended.

But does that invalidate their musical use?

Not all music requires consistent timbre. Even in classical music,
music has been written to exploit timbral inconsistency.

In the early 19th century, trumpets and French horns were still
diatonic instruments with gaps in their scales. There were no finger
keys. All notes were produced by a combination of embouchure, mouth
resonance and breath pressure. There were wide gaps between the
available notes, and a scale was possible only in the upper registers.
For instance, on a C-horn (I'm not making this up, by the way) you
could perhaps play C, E, and G, but D and F were missing. 

However, horn players figured out that if you stuffed your fist in the
bell of the horn, you could change the pitch and thus get the missing
notes. You could play C-D-E-F-G, but D and F would have a different
timbre, so the scale would not sound tonally consistent (sound like the
first octave of a C-harp?).

Composers didn't sneer. They liked what they heard, and wrote music
that exploited the tonal contrasts. If a modern horn player tackels
that old repertoire with a chromatic horn, s/he will miss out on what
the composer intended when he wrote for the diatonic horn, unless they
engage in a little old-fashioned fist action.

(By the way, diatonic horn players did not show up for the gig with a
wagonload of horns in different keys. They had a box of crooks - coiled
lengths of tubing - that fit between the mouthpiece and the body of the
instrument. The crook would put the horn in the desired key.)

Blues certainly exploits dramatic shifts in timbre, and so does jazz,
though it also uses the smooth surface.

Now, I'm known for trying to play ballads on a duck call, so you may
want to take what I say with a grain of salt. But it seems that if
there are multiple timbres associated with multiple note production
techniques, then why not embrace the fact and use it in a musical way?
The result may sound barbaric, but barbarians can sing beautifully in a
barbaric way. That barbarism can be cultivated and refined while still
remaining barbarian.

I agree to some extent with JRR that there's an element of wishful
thinking at times, where harmonica players engage in the fantasy that
fully chromatic playing creates seamless consistency of timbre. For
some purposes, it is desriable to smooth out the contrasts to the
extent possible. But it's even more important to acknowledge and make
use of the contrasts that inevitably occur.

Winslow


 
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