Klarinet Archive - Posting 000021.txt from 1997/05

From: oliver@-----.EDU (Oliver Seely)
Subj: Re: Commercial Music (maybe off-topic)
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 18:16:37 -0400

Without actually taking sides in this discussion, I would add that a revelation
came to me after I had converted to MIDI form the Alexander Grand Quartet for
Clarinet and Strings (1804) after having had to pay $25 for a microfilm of
the score kept in "case X" at UC Berkeley and thinking that I'd run across
some kind of rare lost score only to discover that it was in case X only
because it was one of perhaps a few printed copies still in existence.
As music goes, for my money, it is pretty ho-hum. And that movement
with variations on God Save the King -- give me a break! But consider what
this new age of synthesized music presents to us. There is no recording
of the Alexander Quartet but there is a downloadable MIDI file available
to you at the touch of a keystroke and easily within a quarter of a century
all of the
music of the world is going to be at our fingertips, as MIDI files, as full
play-along orchestrations and a lot of other things that I can't imagine. What
does all of that mean? Well, that there may be (I can hope anyway) an
explosion of understanding of musical trends, particularly as more and
more literature becomes available. There must have been tens of thousands of
pieces composed for chamber groups by court musicians who copied and
modified and plagiarized on others' works. There must be as well a sizeable
body of literature composed by the Kurt Cobains of the past who perhaps
got a little mileage out of various musical jokes and shock effects only to
discover that most of the time such gimmicks don't survive. (remember, I
said "most"). The manuscripts of these works (those that haven't been lost)
are mostly stashed in private and/or obscure libraries around the world.
I fantasize from time to time about haunting some of these places when I
retire for the purpose of sampling a small part of what must be available if
one only goes to look for it, thereby gaining some additional breadth
of knowledge of the heritage of clarinet literature.

Oliver

   
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