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William Kincaid Meets Spectral Analysis

William Kincaid Meets Spectral Analysis

If you attend an orchestral concert, chamber music performance, or solo recital in the United States and a flutist is involved, chances are that you’re hearing a player whose educational pedigree connects him or her to William Morris Kincaid. Kincaid held the principal flute position with the Philadelphia Orchestra for four decades, substantial chunks of both the Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy eras. He made an important contribution to the sumptuous, shimmering “Philadelphia Sound” but just as important was his legacy as the “Father of the American Flute School.” A survey conducted in 2003 found that 87% of American professional flutists could claim a lineage to William Kincaid through one or more of their teachers.

William Kincaid Meets Spectral Analysis
William Kincaid in 1920, the year before he joined the Philadelphia Orchestra

Lois Bliss Herbine is among them. Herbine, based outside of Philadelphia, where she grew up, is a busy freelance musician and pedagogue, especially well known for her skill on piccolo. She performs with several Delaware Valley orchestras, has a large number of students with different levels of experience, and travels widely to give seminars and demonstrations on behalf of Powell Flutes, the most elite manufacturer of professional-quality instruments. Herbine never heard William Kincaid play live (her flute-playing sister, 16 years her senior, once chatted him up at the Academy of Music’s stage door following a Friday afternoon performance) but did study with a series of Kincaid students and “grand-students,” most notably John C. Krell. Joining his mentor in the Philadelphia Orchestra flute section in 1952, Krell served as the ensemble’s piccoloist until 1981. Krell had taken careful lesson notes when he studied with Kincaid at the Curtis Institute. Complemented by additional insights gleaned by sitting a few feet away from his former teacher onstage at the Academy for eight years, Krell published Kincaidiana, a slim volume that, in its second edition, remains available through the National Flute Association website.

What did Lois Herbine learn from William Kincaid that continues to inform her playing today?

Most flutists, 80% in one study, will tell you that the tone, or timbre, they produce is the most important aspect of their playing. There are two components that determine timbre, the attack—the short burst of energy that initiates the sound—and the steady-state phase that follows. For many, it’s the harmonic structure of the latter that’s of primary importance. No instrument produces a “pure” sound of just a single frequency but rather a blend of the “fundamental” (or H1) and the overtones that derive from that pitch. Overtones occur an octave above the fundamental (H2), a fifth above that (H3), at the next octave (H4), two octaves plus a third above the fundamental (H5), two octaves plus a fifth above the fundamental (H6), two octaves plus a minor seventh above the fundamental (H7), and beyond. It’s the precise mixture of these overtones, also called “partials,” that distinguish a clarinet from a trumpet playing the same pitch at the same volume. Or, more subtly, one flute player from another. The specific instrument that’s played—flutes can be made from wood as well as silver, gold, or platinum alloys—matters less than you’d think. Verne Q. Powell, the founder of the illustrious brand, was quoted as saying: “As far as tone is concerned, I contend that 90% of it is the man behind the flute.”

William Kincaid Meets Spectral Analysis
Lois Bliss Herbine, with a Powell piccolo.
Photo credit: Paul Sirochman

Or the woman. When Lois was a young teenager and taking her first lessons with a Kincaid scion, her engineer father analyzed her sonority with scientific test gear. “My Dad came home from work at Leeds and Northrup with a Tektronix 555 oscilloscope,” Herbine told me. “He hooked it up to the iconic Shure 55S microphone from the 1950s (better known as the ‘Elvis Mic’) and created a space for me to test my ability to add overtones to my sound with this visual support. Dad developed test equipment for work and was an inventor on the side, as well. I now believe the use of the oscilloscope to see sound production was a prototype but, for me, it was what you did at home on a Sunday when Mom wouldn’t let you watch TV. As my Dad was also a professional jazz clarinetist and saxophonist—and an amateur flutist—he had an idea of how to explain what to do with my embouchure to create the overtone series in my sound. I recall having a difficult time producing the third harmonic. But when I got it, I learned what that sounded and felt like.”

Mr. Bliss may not have been the first, but he was definitely ahead of his time. “Spectral analysis” graphs of a flute player trying out different techniques of tone production were published as far back as 1967, the year William Kincaid died. The objective investigation of instrumental or vocal tone quality took a big leap forward with the implementation of Fourier analysis. When a Fourier transform (FT) algorithm is applied to a musical signal, the graphic representation is mathematically converted from the time domain to the frequency domain and the harmonic makeup of the sound under study is clearly demonstrated. For a 2014 Master’s thesis at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obisbo, Ron Yorita recorded long tones produced by 31 flutists of various ability levels, from high school students to professionals. A selection of samples was then presented to a group of 41 “skilled flutists” who were asked to describe the sound they heard. These descriptors were then ranked as either favorable (“full,” “rich,” “colorful,” “resonant”) or unfavorable (“unfocused,” “weak,” “thin,” “unsupported.”)

Yorita then correlated these subjective characterizations with the FT spectrograms he’d obtained. He found that the most negatively scored samples had a strong fundamental (H1) and sometimes a strong H2, but little in the way of H3 or H5 contribution. There was a large amplitude gap between the lower harmonics and the upper overtones. On the other hand, with the samples rated most positively, the spectra were very rich in harmonic content; in fact, H2 and H3 could be stronger than the fundamental frequency. Samples with a balance of overtones tended to receive favorable ratings.

Lois Herbine has recorded two albums that, beyond their musical merits, provide useful material with which to assess the treble performance of loudspeakers and other audio components. Take Wing is entirely devoted to piccolo works, both solo (including the first-ever recording of Vincent Persichetti’s Parable XII) and in combination with piano, harp, guitar, and clarinet. The second is a 14-minute EP release called Alight that holds two more pieces for piccolo (the unaccompanied Tweet!, composed for Herbine by Daniel Dorff, and a highly effective arrangement of the “Méditation” from Massenet’s Thaïs) plus Amanda Harberg’s Prayer for flute and piano. Originally the middle movement of a viola concerto, Prayer is a moving and emotionally cathartic work that’s been widely performed by soloists on a number of instruments. Alight was recorded in June of 2018 at a church in Glenside, Pennsylvania by Drew Taurisano, an engineer and producer who works out of Cambridge Sound Studios in South Philadelphia. Taurisano has broad musical experience himself. He has classical training in composition and piano but also spent years playing drums in bands of various stripes. While Take Wing is certainly well recorded, Alight is of reference quality. The sonics are atmospheric, with a strong sense of the venue; it’s believably scaled and tonally resplendent—the work of an engineer who has had a lot of exposure to real sound in a real space. 

William Kincaid Meets Spectral Analysis
Fig. 1. Spectrogram of Lois Herbine’s “Red” tone

For many years, Lois Herbine has used color associations to describe the tone quality employed under different musical circumstances. She refers to the two poles of her timbral range as “Blue” and “Red.” Blue has a diffuse, pastel-like, somewhat hollow inflection, “a wash of airy sound.” Red has a more robustly complex character; with a Red sonority, Herbine explains, “flutists can occasionally feel the metal vibrate sympathetically in their hands.” Red can be a bit “edgy, a fully saturated sound” in the flute’s lower register but “glistens like a diamond, clear and vibrant” up high. An experienced player can create these different tonal shades by adjusting physical aspects of the way they produce sound. Herbine told me: “Varying the contour of the lips by firming the corners of the mouth to control the size of the aperture is the methodology I use.”

William Kincaid Meets Spectral Analysis
Fig. 2. Spectrogram of Lois Herbine’s “Blue” tone

Lois met Drew Taurisano at his studio to record long tones for spectral analysis. The Fourier transform plots for Herbine’s Red and Blue tones are shown in Figures 1 and 2. The Red spectrogram shows distinct peaks for the first seven frequencies of the overtone series—Taurisano calls it “the most balanced of all the tones Lois creates.” With a Blue tone, however, H2 is nearly as prominent as the fundamental and, while the H3 and H4 partials are apparent, they are lower in amplitude than with Red—and there’s not much in the way of structured harmonic content above that. This surely goes a long way to explain the cool, almost vacant sound of Herbine’s Blue sonority. As an example of how Herbine can modulate her timbre to serve an artistic end, consider the five-measure passage from Prayer shown in Figure 4. (Alight can be streamed at CD quality with TIDAL, Qobuz, Amazon, or Apple Music.) The musical line intensifies as the pitch ascends and the volume increases but also because the tone color progresses from a serene Blue sonority through a Purple intermediary to a full-throated Red at the climax of the phrase.

William Kincaid Meets Spectral Analysis
Fig.3 Spectrogram of Lois Herbine’s “Burnt orange” tone

Herbine identifies additional tonal colors that can potentially be correlated with spectrograms. “Diffused grey” is as devoid of overtones as Herbine can make it to produce a “lifeless” quality. “Burnt orange” (Figure 3) is a sonority associated with “angry” or “agitato” music. Drew Taurisano describes it as “alien territory”—H2 is actually louder than H1. The engineer observes, “It’s not a natural way for a vibrating body to generate harmonics,” which may contribute to the dis-ease it can induce in a listener. 

William Kincaid Meets Spectral Analysis
Fig 4. Bars 27 – 31 of Amanda Harberg’s Prayer for flute and piano, as annotated by Lois Bliss Herbine. Herbine begins the ascending passage with a Blue tone that intensifies through Purple to turn Red (her timbre with the most richly developed harmonic content as the soloist prepares an octave interval leap.

In her dedication to preserving William Kincaid’s musical bequest, Lois Herbine is certainly not alone. As an orchestral player, she will often encounter kindred spirits.  “A soloist”—Herbine mentions violinist Pamela Frank, oboist Richard Woodhams, and pianist Marc-André Hamelin as examples—“will come up to me and basically say, ‘I hear you. I know what you’re doing. I know your schooling.’” Still, with the passing of time, the tradition is at risk of fading away. Herbine has been in touch with John Krell’s heirs and has been given permission to write a book based on his surviving syllabuses. When it comes to tone production, and just about any other aspect of instrumental technique and style, the more experienced have traditionally instructed younger ones in two ways—by demonstration (“Play it like this”) and by descriptive language (“Red” vs. “Blue”). To complement those time-honored teaching modalities, carefully produced spectrograms have the potential to become the most enduring representations of what Stokowski and Ormandy were after back in the day. If you come for flute lessons with Lois Bliss Herbine, be prepared for the possibility that you may be asked to study some Fourier transforms. Where’s an engineer when you need one?

Tags: CLASSICAL MUSIC RECORDING

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