Word: legato
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...once. After playing for a few moments, my musical patient laid his instrument aside with an air of utter resignation. 'Doctor, that depression in the center of the palate is no good for me-the air becomes stranded in the hollow. I can't produce a normal legato...
Contrary to all the learned treatises that classicists may write on the subject, good jazz today is fundamentally a legato (smooth) style, rather than a staccato (jerky) style. How many times have you seen "Jazz is the result of playing melodies in short, heavily accented and staccato phrases." . . . That's like defining an automobile as a stagecoach. The definition and the symphony men's idea of jazz are 'way behind the times...
...next day questioned the artistic value of the human whistle. He had felt really frustrated at the age of 12, when his boyish soprano voice broke and his only musical outlet was whistling. He learned then to produce his tones breathing in or out, to hold a long-sustained legato, trill like a coloratura. After his graduation from Bucknell University (Class of 1928) he began his double life: Five days a week he is Edward B. Dolbey, working in his father's chemical shop. Saturdays and Sundays he is Andrew Garth, the whistler, who lists himself as such...
...Smith's "legato has no vibrato" (TIME, Dec. 12) carries the wrong implication: namely, that absence of vibrato is a mark of good singing...
Therefore, the meaning of TIME'S comment, "legato has no vibrato," if true, means that the famous politician has no musical feeling to express. The chances, however, are that he did sing with a vibrato which was so subtle as to escape the ear of the critic...