Klarinet Archive - Posting 000059.txt from 1994/07

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Playing as an artist or a historian
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 1994 16:55:12 -0400

Edgar Pearlstein suggests that one cannot simultaneously be both
an artist and a music historian. Furthermore, I detect in his
brief but interesting comments, a preference for one over the other
(though, perhaps, I am reading too much into his few remarks so I'll
just stick with the first sentence.)

Edgar, I could not possibly agree with you less. Our differences on
this matter are so vast as possibly to preclude any communication. I
think dialogue is good, but when one starts from such anti-polar
positions, movement to a point of mutual agreement rarely happens.

That many players are artists but know little about the music they
play is probably the case. Simultaneously, that many historians
cannot play at a professional level is also probably the case. But
to distinguish the two (as it appears to me you have tried to do) as
being incompatible is an idea so foreign to me that I don't even
know where to start hitting it. So I won't.

I just did not want you to think (in the absence of any response)
that there was not at least one person who disagreed with you. It
is just such an attitude that makes so many of our performances
historical anachronisms, and so much of our musical history
incompatible with matters of performing practicality. It is a musical
isolationist philosophy that says that one's vision never needs to have
any feeding or that one's knowledge never needs to be expanded.

This is not a flame. It is simply a measured response to a position
that I am not in agreement with. Thank you for posting your views
on the subject.

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