User talk:Shahrdad

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Thanks for the correction of the Maria Callas article.

--Captbaritone (talk) 00:33, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Maria Callas anti-infobox enforcement tag

It's invisible to viewers, only visible to editors. It's at the very top of the page. One of the Wikiproject Opera members re-added it most recently in this edit today. Robert K S (talk) 16:30, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

It's controversial, but as far as I can tell, about a year ago, a few members of Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera decided that no biographical opera article should have an infobox. Then they set about removing infoboxes from biographical opera articles and placing a little tag at the top of them saying, essentially, no infoboxes allowed. Only a couple of editors opposed this course of action, and now the several editors over at WikiProject Opera believe the issue is closed and that a consensus prevails. This "consensus" was formed by fewer than ten editors, and the current guideline as written on their project page was really only agreed to by its author and two other editors. By WP:OWN, ownership of articles is not allowed, but this tagging of opera articles seems to me to place ownership over opera articles and enforce a particular guideline over those articles. (In this case the guideline is not in conformity with the Wikipedia at large, which broadly accepts infoboxes.) I don't have any strong opinion as to whether or not Maria Callas needs an infobox or not, but I believe it is wrong for a group of editors to impose their little rule on the potentially thousands of articles to which they may believe it might apply. Robert K S (talk) 17:14, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Shake

I think from the context it is clear that it cannot mean trill. Since we disagree, I removed the link altogether, and the text can stand on its own. Best regards, -- Ssilvers (talk) 15:05, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I heard back from Robert Selestky regarding the "Shake," and this was his reponse:

Shake is ALWAYS "trill." That usage goes back to the 16th century and continues through the 19th. The word "vibrato" is modern and was not used at all; the effect was sometimes called "tremolo" when referring to that stop on the organ, but "tremolo" for voice in 17th century Italy meant what we call "trill"--2 notes, while their "trillo" meant trill on a single note--an effect that died out in the late 17th century. In English, trill is always called "shake." Geminiani (1751), in his violin treatise, is the only one who also refers to a "close shake" which described a two-finger micro-tonal trills (which no one does any more), while using "shake" to mean trill--like all others in English, obviously including Chorley. As to vibrato as such, instrumental treatises tend not to have a word for it other than tremolo; Geminiani actually describes and says "this cannot possibly be described in words." Most string treatises discourage its use except Geminiani. Wind instruments never used it so it's a moot point. I can't even think of any period vocal treatises that even discuss it except Tosi where, in the English translation, he pejoratively refers to it as "fluttering in the manner of those who sing in a very bad taste."

If you listen to old (pre-1910) instrumental recordings, there is NO organic vibrato; with winds, even the Scala recordings of the 1950s, lack it; and just listen to the oboe in the Mexico AIDAs! Completely straight tone. Strings started to use it organically after gut strings were abandoned as a result of the unavailability (they were made in Germany and Italy) during the first world war, and it stuck, unfortunately; but even great 20th century violin pedagogues like Leopold Auer discouraged its use. My feeling is that the voice starts to vibrate naturally as it hits a certain volume level, but it was never deliberate. The fast "fluttering" was considered anathema, and I doubt anyone with a wobbly, wide tremolo that he or she couldn't control would have considered a vocal career at all.

Also in an article called "The Trill is Gone", which was published in Opera News in January 1999, Will Crutchfield writes:

Debate has swirled over the question of whether the trill can be taught to singers who cannot do it spontaneously -- or, as an English translator of Gianbattista Mancini put it in the eighteenth century, "whether it is possible to give the shake where nature has witheld it." ("Shake" is the old British term for the trill; historically, it doesn't mean anything different from "trill," though some voice teachers today use it colloquially to mean one or another of the defective ways the trill can be approximated.)

I went ahead and restored the link between Shake and Trill in the Callas Article. Shahrdad (talk) 21:38, 29 May 2008 (UTC)