Klarinet Archive - Posting 000117.txt from 1994/01
From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU> Subj: Re: Karen's and Charles comments on performance practice Date: Thu, 20 Jan 1994 09:51:11 -0500
I want to wait a few days and let everyone put their comments on
the table before I respond to the interesting and insightful remarks
of Karen and Charles. So don't feel that I have gone anywhere or
chickened out of an interesting discussion.
But so that we don't wander off into the forest, keep in mind that one
of the things that is responsible for the need to understand performance
practice is the inherent weakness in music notation. It does not
permit us fully to understand what the composer wanted done. True it
gives us the pitch of the note to be played and some sense of the
duration of that pitch, but beyond that, music notation does not convey
the things that a composer had in mind at the time of composition.
And example of this has to do with the taking of repeat signs in minuets.
Because of the lack of clarity, a convention has developed about how to
play minuets. No one needs to tell a performer how to do this today, since
we all do it automatically; i.e., all repeats first time through, no repeats
second and later times through. This impacts how we play, for example,
the Gran Partitta which has two minuets, both of which have two trios.
Now I assert that Mozart and his contemporaries did not play minuets this
way, and they did not for a particular musical reason. Something valuable
was made out of all those repeats that we simply do not do today. This
is a notational difficulty that results in the performance of a work that
is in conflict with the way the piece asks to be played. The absence of
those repeats results in something being missing from the performance
and this injures the fragile nature of these works.
None of this is in conflict with Karen and Charles comments. I just wanted
to explain that the need for an understanding of performance practices
derives from a very practical problem.
The aesthetics of the matter (which is more what Karen and Charles were
speaking of) is equally important but I want to reserve my response till
some more people get into the act. But I thank Karen and Charles for their
thoughtful and well-stated remarks. I hope all the input to this matter
will be so carefully considered.
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Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
(leeson@-----.edu)
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