Klarinet Archive - Posting 000408.txt from 1997/01

From: Gary Young <gyoung@-----.COM>
Subj: Re: Stravinsky
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 00:21:20 -0500

Sherri -- Thanks for the cite to Stravinsky; I haven't read the
autobiography, but have read Poetics of Music, which has similar statements
-- that was why I made my comments about him in particular. I think
Stravinsky was a condescending though provocative and fascinating writer,
and a control freak, though a great composer.

If the performer is (merely) an executant of the score, then Stravinsky was
a bad performer of his own music. See Richard Taruskin, Text & Act,
passim.

But the performer is not merely an executant of the score, and could not
conceivably be, because the score does not begin to give the performer all
the instructions he/she needs to perform, because the score can contain
errors, because the score can be internally inconsistent given the
assumptions of the tradition within which it was written, and because the
score is not the only manifestation of the composer's intentions (there are
parts, recordings by the composer, drafts, notations on scores, comments in
letters, oral comments), and some of those manifestations indicate either
uncertainly or a change of mind about the score. To take just the first
point, any score, like any set of instructions, is incomplete. Consider the
score for John Cage's sonata, which expressly states that phrasing and
dynamics are not given. Many other composers give general indications of
phrasing and dynamics, but none does or can give full instructions on these
matters. That is left to the performer, Stravinsky notwithstanding.

I think the more accurate view of what the composer has given us (in the
score and in all other manifestations of intention) is suggested by John
Harbison's liner notes for a new (and stunning) recording of his Piano
Sonata No. 1 by Judith Gordon. He says: "All of the pianists who have
played it have brought their own sense of proportion, contrast and piano
sonority to the piece, which was very much my intention. The sonata
invites the performer's play of personality and fantasy. Judith Gordon's
many performances of the sonata have discovered textures and colors which
reveal the sonata's impressionistic undercurrents. It is indeed conjured
up rather than premeditated." Not all compositions invite the performer's
play of personality and fantasy, to be sure, but certainly all do invite
the performer's collaboration in filling in the details of the instructions
found, perhaps ambiguously and certainly incompletely, in the score.
Performers are not CD players that mechanically translate a complete
realization of a piece in one medium (electromagnetic) into a complete
realization in another (acoustic) medium.
----------
From: Nichelle A. Crocker[SMTP:crockena@-----.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 1997 7:15 PM
Subject: Stravinsky

Gary Young says:

>So if William O. Smith says "A clarinet," we're crazy to use a Bb. But if
>Stravinsky says "A clarinet," the conclusion is not so clear. With
>Stravinsky, if we have a good reason to use a Bb, why not? We -- and he
>--don't always follow his mm markings, so why be slavish about his
>instrument specifications?

Read Stravinsky's Autobiography. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy on
hand,
but there's a great quote about how interpretation on the part of
performers
horrified him, and that he considered the performer an executant of the
score.

(It's worth the trouble, since Stravinsky was a great writer in the
literary sense as well as in the musical sense.)

Nichelle Crocker
crockena@-----.edu

   
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