Klarinet Archive - Posting 000080.txt from 1994/03

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Mozart and authenticity
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 1994 13:21:04 -0500

Cary Karp in Sweden has sent us the benefit of some really
brilliant insight with respect to how some of today's players
feel about both the performance capabilities of previous
generations of players, and issues of performance practice.
There is no way that I can improve or even add anything intelligent
to his splendid remarks so I am going to go off onto a different
tangent to see if I can get anywhere near the target he hit so
very dead center.

I cannot speak of other cultures, but we Americans have ambivalent
feelings about old things. On one hand, we love and respect them
(as shown by our penchant for using phrases like "Good old boy")
and on the other, we have no respect for them (as shown by the
number of law suits brought by older people who claim unfair
age-discrimination.

This appears to be particularly true in music. Only five or so
years ago, the entire compliment of the Lincoln Center Chamber
Players was summarily fired and the New York Times reported that
the party who authorized the wholesale replacement stated publicly
"that we need to get some young people in that group in order to
blow those musty old musical ideas away" (paraphrased).

I think this is a perennial problem of youth vs age and we are
not going to solve it here. I see this even in my kids. They
think that they discovered sex and that all previous generations
were Victorian moralist prudes. And I even saw on this list
a note making reference to Stubbins book on clarinet playing that
contained the phrase "good for its day" as if somehow there has
been a major revolution in how to play the clarinet since Stubbins
stopped teaching just 20 or so years ago, maybe 30.

Phrases which are anathematic to me, such as "Only today do we really know..."
or "In those days, they did not understand ..." are further
evidence of the perennial presence of an unjustified sense of
faith in the intellectual superiority of today's wisdom to the
exclusion of earlier epochs.

There are some very astoundingly good clarinet players alive and
working today, but Simeon Bellison was as good as any of them,
and so was Frederick Thurston, and so was McLain of Philadelphia.
These men would have been important decorations to any orchestra
that ever was or ever will be. And they did not have Buffet R13s,
or VanDoren Reeds, or B-45 mouthpieces, or Rose studies, or
any of the things that "today enable us to achieve new heights of
performance." They tied reeds on with string (which I understand
is making a comeback), used fish-skin pads, owned Albert system
clarinets, and played circles around everybody in sight.

With time, physical maturity is inevitable. With experience, musical
maturity flowers. But intellectual maturity and an appreciation that
past generations made valuable contributions that we could well make
an effort to learn about, is something that comes only too late to
most of us, probably myself included.

When I read the responses from some of our wonderful colleagues on
this list with respect to the issues of period instruments and
performance practice, I occasionally become saddened. Because what
I read far too often is that "today is a new day, and we must forget
what was done in the past; the past is not prologue; it is only an
old-fashioned and obsolete way of doing something."

I see such statements as a fatal combination of ignorance and arrogance.
And so that you don't think I am just picking on younger people, this
same unfortunate attitude is often present at the level of the mature
professional player, some of whom feel that only they have any
insight into the performance issues of the Mozart repertoire (which
is what this entire discussion began with, if you remember).

Dan Leeson

====================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
(leeson@-----.edu)
====================================