Klarinet Archive - Posting 000137.txt from 1994/03

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: The fouler to the foulee
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 1994 22:20:26 -0500

Foul! has been cried in my interpretation of the pharase "waste our time"
but no matter how I read that paragraph, I come up with the same thing. I
sense that it represents precisely how you feel about the role of the
scholar viz a viz the role of the performer.

You ask with great eloquence: "If the accumulated musicological research
of, say, the last 30 years doesn't make us better players than players of 30
years ago then why bother?" Terrific question. Well stated.

No research is going to affect the performer if he or she does not find out
about it and consider implementing the fruitsof that research. Musicologists
have toiled fiercely to find out more about the performance of music from
ca. 1750 to ca. 1825. Can you tell me the last course you took on this
subject? Can you name any papers you have read that deal with this subject?
Do you own any of the thousands of books that have been printed with this
as the topic? I mean no disrespect whatsoever, but what do you really know
about performance practice of the classic era? Have you made an effort to
find out about the performance practices relating to trills? What about
grace notes? Which ones go on the beat? Which ones go before the beat?
etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

It is strange logic to chastise a school boy for not knowing Ovid in the
original when he has been denied a Latin education.

The bottom line is that clarinet players (almost more than any other
instrumentalist) make a serious effort not to know about scholarly
developments in the field in which they make a living. We are proud
in our ignorance and seem to take an aggressive posture when one
suggests that there is something to be learned.

Instead we say, "Don't tell me how to play that piece. I've been playing
it for 30 years!" The fact that we may have been playing it wrong for
30 years never enters into our thinking process.

You chat with a piano player that does Mozart and they really make an
effort to find out how things are done. Oboe players are freaks about
keeping up on mordents, trills, acciagture, etc. Flutists are constantly
bombarded in the literature about how to play Quantz. But tell a clarinet
player that there is no cadenza in the Mozart concerto and you run the
risk of emasculation. "WHAT!!! No Cadenza? What kind of a moron are you?"

Mechanically we are playing as well as anyone. Musically, we are very
dull, uninformed, and unimaginative people.

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