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Doublereed Archive - Posting 000016.txt from 2007/12

From: "HAROLD" <harold@-----.br>
Subj: Re: [DR-L] Speaking with live (and dead) composers?
Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:01:21 -0500

Many thanks for all this interesting and valuable info Phil.And good luck on
the performance and reception of your works.
I wish I had an opportunity to meet up with the live composer before
recording his work. He further explained to me that the opus was about
Mahler's incestual love for his sister ,which he tried to suppress,and which
was contained within the music--with an excerpt for the orch. of Mahler's
6th.
The other work we recorded,14th July in Nantes,was about the fireworks
during the French celebration on this date.(I first thought he was referring
musically to the guillitoines)
Few musicians, by my experience,ever query about what they are
performing--other than the notes.
Rgds,

harold emert
Rio-Brazil

> There's an amusing paragraph in "The Art of Quartet Playing, The Guarneri
> Quartet in Conversation with David Blum" (Knopf 1986).
>
> The topic is on how to interpret two eigth notes (same pitch) both beamed
> and tied together (when it seems obvious that a straight quarter note
> could easily have been used instead, as far as the notation goes).
>
> From page 73, The Shaping Process
>
> SOYER: I have an amusing story about this. Some years ago I met a girl who
> claimed to be a clairvoyant and to have spoken with Dante. I asked her if
> she thought she could also speak with Beethoven, and she said, "I don't
> see why not. What is it you would like to know?" I wrote out one of these
> examples of slurs over two notes and put a big question mark next to it.
> Several weeks later I ran into her. "I've just spoken with Beethoven," she
> said. "I'm never going to do that again. He was very unpleasant; he's
> short, has a rough voice--and I don't even speak German. But I showed him
> what you had written and he sang the answer. It sounded like this:
> 'uhh-uhh . . . uhh-uhh.'" This girl had had no musical training and
> couldn't possibly have known what the notation meant.
>

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