ZKV 117 (timbre)

 ZKV 117 (timbre)

 

At a concert given in a local church last year, Michala Petri, an international icon among recorder players, included in her programme her own transcription of a Bach cello suite for treble recorder. And she preceded her performance by explaining what was so different about playing the cello suites on her instrument. Her remarks reminded me strongly of what happens when I translate poetry from one language into another and am asked about my priorities. After the usual discussions about form and content, denotation and connotation, rhyme, accent, prosody (the way the poem breathes), a question sometimes asked is: Why does the translation, no matter how good, always feel different? And the answer seems to have a lot to do with the sound picture of a poem in two different languages. An example:

 

 

Clearly, the cello and the recorder produce very different sounds. But Michala Petri asked us to pursue the subject more closely. The pitch of the treble recorder is much higher than that of the cello. The range of the cello is larger than that of the recorder. This means that it may be necessary to transpose the original key to another one, and to change the pitch of certain phrases if the notes lie outside what the recorder can produce. But that is only part of the difference. The cello is a string instrument – the sounds produced are produced by causing strings to vibrate with a bow. The recorder produces sounds by air being blown through a mouthpiece. The upper register of the recorder is produced by pinching the hole at the back of the recorder and increasing the intensity of the blowing. The cellist can modify sounds produced in volume by increased pressure on the strings, and modify the nature of any sound by moving the bow closer to the bridge. Fingers too can slide during the playing of a single note to produce a glissando. A cello can play more strings than one at the same time, whereas a recorder can only produce one note at a time. All these differences lead to a different timbre  the unique quality or colour of the sound, even when the same note is being played with the same loudness. And this explains why the music, despite all the notes being identical, feels so different when played on to musical instruments that differ in the way sound is produced. It is also why a Danish poem will ‘sound odd’ when translated into English, no matter how good the translation is. And the more the two languages differ, the greater the shift in timbre is going to be; just think of the cello suites played on a tenor saxophone, a bassoon – or a xylophone.