Klarinet Archive - Posting 000136.txt from 1994/03

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Scott McChesney's comments
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 1994 22:00:48 -0500

Thank you for your input to this matter Scott. It certainly is
understandable that you presumed your dad to be correct with
respect to his information about Mozart's compositional mechanics
and his creative process.

There is nothing wrong about being misinformed about factual information
in and of itself. But I caution you not to draw the conclusions that
you drew and which were based exclusively on your understanding of
how Mozart worked.

I also want to clarify that the process of interpreting music must go
hand in hand with a knowledge of what was happening musically during
the period of time that the piece was written. And should one not know
much about an epoch, this will show in the performance of music created
during that epoch.

You may not be aware of this, but there are periods in the history of
music where so little is known about the customs and practices of those
periods, that the music created then cannot be performed at all. We
are unable to decipher how to even play it. Both the notation and the
instrumental resources remain a great unknown despite decades of study.
Even the madrigal resurfaced after a several hundred year hiatus thanks to
the pioneering work of Alfred Einstein in the 1920s and 30s.

Thank goodness that Mozart is not in that class and that there has been
a very good transition of information from his time to ours that enables
us to do many things stylistically correctly when performing such music.
But our ignorance of the many opportunities available to us when we
play it (and the fact that we miss most of them) stands as testament to
how much we don't know about performing this fragile music.

Perhaps the most important difference in philosophy between then and
now is that Mozart expected the performer to be part of the creative
process when he or she performed a solo work, whereas today, we limit
ourselves to simply reproducing what it was he wrote and avoiding
any creativity whatsoever. (I should mention that I do not think that
performance in the most general sense is a creative activity and this
may well be a very controversial perspective of the role of a player.)

This important difference is what causes us to focus on those aspects
of performance that tend to freeze and ossify music. Those things that
enable creativity in performance are either discouraged, not taught, or
denied as being in the realm of the performing artist.

Thank you very much for your contribution to this discussion. Please
do not go away. Join us again and again. We can all learn here.

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