Klarinet Archive - Posting 000256.txt from 1995/01

From: Steven Popper <swpopper@-----.ORG>
Subj: Brahmsian Verse
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 1995 11:19:10 -0500

I currently have 462 backlogged messages in my "klarinet" holding
file, so I will refrain from commenting on current discussions until I am
properly caught up. However, I found something yesterday that I thought I
would share with the 'net.

I was poking through the bin of pretty well beat up sheet music in
a used book store when I ran across the following:

"Johannes Brahms' Klarinetten Quintett", by Chilean poet, Totila Albert
(1892-1967). It was a large size booklet, in the sheet music bin because
it indeed reproduces the melody line from the entire work albeit, broken
up into musical "phrases" which are arrayed spacially on the page with
space between the phrases. What Albert then did was to use the music as a
setting for his poetry. For instance, "Satz 3" begins as follows:

Nimmt etwa dich heute Gott zu dich

hast du Ewigkeit genug fur seine Lust am Ich?

Uber kurz oder lang bist du Stimme in dem vaeterlichen

Liebesgesang!

Warum ich? Hab ich denn solche Lust am Ich

dass ich hoffen koennte darum naehm mich Gott zu sich?...

--- from "Johannes Brahms' Klarinetten Quintett", by
Totila Albert, copyright 1967 by Claudio Naranjo,
Berkeley, CA.

You get the idea. (Hum the opening theme of the Quintet's third
movement to yourself. You will finde that it scans properly.) I have
reproduced the spacial order. The music is written out above each
separate phrase.

This clearly opens up a whole new field of endeavor for members of
the List and the wider clarinet community. Might it not be possible, for
example, to take the Mozart quintet, set the music into a series of
recitative and arias, and thus produce an entirely new opera? ("La Clemenza
di Buffet"? "Abduction from the Reed Wizard"?) The mind fairly reels at
the vistas suddenly vouched us safe. An epic oratorio derived from
several carefully chosen Rose studies? I don't know about you all, but
I'll get little or no work done this day!

Steven W. Popper
RAND Corporation