Klarinet Archive - Posting 000511.txt from 1995/05

From: niethamer@-----.BITNET
Subj: Re: Performance practice and tradition
Date: Fri, 19 May 1995 06:40:55 -0400

Dan's very lucid note reminded me of something I re-read this week in
preparation for a performance of the Ebony Concerto. From "The Poetics of
Music in the Form of Six Lessons", the words of Igor Stravinsky:

"A real tradition is not the relic of a past irretrievably gone; it is a
living force that animates and informs the present."

"Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes
the reality of what endures. It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that
one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to
one's descendants."

BTW, I highly recommend the whole book - very thoughtful and lucid, but
not impossibly dense.

David Niethamer