Klarinet Archive - Posting 000500.txt from 1995/05

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Performance practice and the cultural clarinet
Date: Fri, 19 May 1995 06:40:45 -0400

Dunja's note on Bulgarian clarinet playing as well as the many notes
on klezmer performance and Greek clarinets in G, etc. got me to thinking
about the matter of performance practice and its relationship to all these
disparate styles.

There have been postings on this board that refuted the notion of a
set of performance guidelines for (for example) the classic period saying
something to the effect that the poster "was a modern and contemporarily
trained player and did not believe that he or she was bound by the
strictures of classical performance practice when playing classical music."
That person might say, "That was then. This is now."

And yet the performance practices of klezmer music are such that if one
were to ignore them completely (under the same argument of being a
modern person etc., etc.) what would come out might very well be good
clarinet playing but bad klezmer. I would suspect that this would be
equally true for Bulgarian playing, Greek playing,or any cultural
specialty. One can't ignore the traditions!

So to be a culturally acceptable player (such as Don Byron, an Afro
American playing klezmer), one simply must become acculturated in the
musical traditions (i.e., read "performance practice") of that music.

And to be a musically acceptable player one must also become acculturated
in the musical traditions of any composition including eingange and
improvsiation in the classic era, for example. For without them, one
is precisely in the same boat that I would be in if I were to try and
play Bulgarian music; i.e., the right things would simply not come out.

Alternatively, if no one had every heard Bulgarian clarinet playing and
I were to give a concert of nothing but that, explaing that Bulgarian
playing is always done in dungarees and a turban, the audience, not
having any experience with the form might very well think that this was
Bulgarian playing. Of course it would be more sham than substance.

And that is exactly what happens when we play the classical period repertoire
for clarinet today. It has been so long since anyone heard it done
with the appropriate traditions, that playing in dungarees and a turban
is thought to be fully sufficient to achieve the proper level of classical
performance traditions!

The bottom line is that one is certainly permitted to ignore the traditions
of the music of any epoch, but one should not think that the playing of
music from that era can be effectively accomplished with no knowledge of
those traditions.

It's a lot like music theory. Until you learn the rules, you are not
permitted to break them. A musician who breaks rules s/he does not know
is an ignoramus. A musican who is trained in the rules and knows how to
break them is a genius!

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