Klarinet Archive - Posting 000080.txt from 1994/04

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Verdi
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 20:59:16 -0400

Ah, the curse of Tutunkamen strikes again. Open mouth. Insert foot!

Bob Spring of Arizona State takes issue with my comments about the
Rigoletto fantasy, and I add for those that missed those comments, that
I was very negative about both this work and this style of music in
general. It is simply my opinion, not necessarily a statement of what
is true and what is not true. I am not wise enough to know that, but in
music, it does not take much intelligence to hold an opinion on
something.

Bob says "These works are part of our heritage as clarinetists, are
fun to perform, people love to hear them and they are really damn hard!"

Well, I admit, they are hard. We have no disagreement with respect to
that issue. But are they really part of our heritage as clarinetists?
I don't think so. Cornets, yes. Clarinets, no. Violinists, yes.
Clarinets, no. In fact, I suspect that clarinet players got into the
act of playing this kind of music very late, and only after cornets
had been in the business of playing works with variations of ever-
increasing difficulty for some time. I think clarinetists were Johnnys
come lately in the environment.

As I look over the history of clarinet playing for the last century and
a half, I cannot find this kind of performance achieving prominence
for any large number of clarinet players. If it were as popular as
Bob suggests, we would have our own collection of soloists as
remarkable as those that ruled the cornet and euphonium world for a century.

Continuing with Bob's comments (and when Bob talks about the clarinet
and clarinet playing, I listen very, very carefully), I know of no
survey that would sustain his assertion that "people love to hear them."
Maybe in the days of the Sousa band when Frank Simon played the
Carnival of Venice with 22 variations, they were popular, but by the 1930s,
it was almost all over for this style of music.

And I must be commercial here: why would anyone spend 5 minutes with
this kind of repertoire when it has almost no commercial appeal. I
do not remember the last time I heard anyone do this kind of music
on a clarinet in public. Maybe at some college it is nostalgic to
play one, but where people are making serious money as musicians,
this style of playing just does not get done. Jimmie Wall of the
Goldman band used to play this sort of thing from time to time and
it was never popular. Worse, he was sort of stuck with the handle
that that was all he could do (which was certainly not the case) and
gigs did not flow to him precisely because he COULD do that style.
It was considered to corny.

I played with Pavarotti last week and I am reminded that on one of
his previous tours, he brought along an Italian flutist who played
one of those 8,000,000 notes per square inch variation sets, and
the audience was bored to tears. I know that the audience was just
waiting for Pavarotti, but while the flutist did his set of
variations on something or other, the audience was fuming that they
had to sit through this awful performance of some very trivial music,
just to get to hear Pavarotti. That had been had.

The last of the great trumpet players who did this sort of thing was
Jimmy Burke of the Goldman band. And since Jimmy stopped playing,
the style has died.

That does not mean that it should not be resurrected if there is some
musical substance to it. Bob feels that there is musical substance,
I don't. I find it childish music with only one purpose: to show
the flash and dash of the soloist. All glitz, no substance. The
sizzle on the steak. You can't eat it but it sounds good.

And I am not opposed to nostalgia, either. I very much enjoy music
of other epochs. Only things like the Rigoletto variations (and that
ilk) are abrasive to me. And for the following reasons:

(1) except in rare cases, I feel the music to be trivial

(2) the underlying harmonic structure of such music is too simple
to sustain continued interest over a long period of time; i.e.,
the Carnival of Venice variations is 15 minutes worth of tonic and
dominant seventh chords and nothing else.

(3) the purpose of such music, I have already spoken about, namely
that instead of the player bringing service to the music, this kind
of composition is designed to bring service to the performer.

(4) it raises hand speed to an unprincipled level of importance; I think
that there is probably no teacher in the world who would rate technical
fluency to be of greater importance than any other musical skills, but
this kind of music technique uber alles.

Finally, if this kind of music is all that Bob suggests, then why did
it die? Was it the passing of an era? Couldn't the players do it any
longer? (And that is certainly not the case with Bob's performance
of music of this type.) The reason why this kind of music went away
was because there was little call for it any longer. The world became
musically more sophisticated and these works could not satisfy that
sophistication.

I play with the new Sousa Band under Keith Brion and do a bunch of concerts
every year. At each one (because our business is nostalgia) something
of this nature is always played. Luis Maldonado of Michigan does a
smashing set of variations on Endearing Young Charms on his euphonium.
It is remarkably well played. But in the end it is like the elephant
who stood on his trunk. The trick was not that the elephant did it well.
It was that he did it at all.

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