Klarinet Archive - Posting 000065.txt from 1996/07

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: The tongue and music of the classic period
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 04:41:05 -0400

Suffice it to say that Romantic music changed the way clarinet players
perceive the tongue in performance.

Romantic music, particularly Brahms, has always been considered most
effectively performed with long, long, long lines of endless melody.
That is not an insult to such music (I would not do that in any case),
just an observation about its influence on music in general.

Now it is one thing to want to have a smooth surface texture in music
of the Romantic era, but quite another to apply that same musical
philosophy to music of a century earlier.

The music of the classic era was perceived by composers of that period
as having a much rougher (perhaps "more articulate" or "more
distinct" are better phrases) surface texture than we are used to today.
That difference in musical philosophy makes many performances of
K. 622 or K. 581 far too smooth in terms of the texture of the solo
line.

When one examines a Mozart autograph that has a lot of clarinet
writing, one is astonished at how much he left unarticulated in the
solo writing. The natural reaction to such music is to presume that
he left off slurs either because he forgot to put them in, or else
under the presumption that everyone would know that such passages
were not to be tongued.

To which one can only say: horse hockey!

Mozart was a remarkably careful score writer. When he put something
in or left something out, such action is invariably deliberate and
you change it at the peril of your soul.

No where is this more clear than in the 1875 edition of the Mozart
Requiem. Who did Breitkopf and Hartel get to edit this champion
work for the first complete edition of the music of Mozart? Brahms
himself!! That's right. The editor of (until recently) the only
edition of Mozart's Requiem was Johannes Brahms, the world champion
of the long, uninterrupted melodic line.

Although he tried not to overinvolve himself in the edition, he
was unable to prevent himself from changing much of the wind
writing by the addition of long slurs, replacing the rougher
surface texture of the Mozart original with his own view of how
smooth the surface texture should be.

So today the world is backwards and a poster asks how much tonguing
there should be in K. 622? I suppose we will never know because we
don't have very much of a definitive source document. But what we
do have (viz a viz that famous basset horn in G fragment) is very
precisely articulated. On the other hand, what one hears in performances
of this work is a ton of slurring under the impression that that is
what the music is striving for; i.e., the long, uninterrupted,
breathless legato.

The single most serious error in performing the solo clarinet music
of Mozart (actually the second most serious error) is the emphasis
on making a square peg fit into a round hole. While there is nothing
wrong with the magnificence of the long melodic line in the music
of Brahms, applying that same set of values to Mozart's music is
equivalent to insisting that all Roman citizens should wear hoop skirts.

It would be equally wrong to apply the classic view of the surface
texture of music to compositions of the romantic era.

Music is not now, nor has it ever been, a single stylistic stream. You
have to know a lot about each of its periods to perform those periods
with something other than stylistic chaos. When I was much younger,
the most serious social error one could make was to wear brown shoes
with black pants. Today it is no big deal. But when one goes to see
a movie that supposedly captures the essence of that period to which I
refer, you NEVER see brown shoes with black pants. That's because
all of the directors are my age and they know what was appropriate
for that period. A century from now that will have all been forgotten
and period pieces of America in the 1940s and 1950s will show all the
actors without any attention being paid to the color of the shoes
as contrasted with the color of the pants.

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