Klarinet Archive - Posting 000460.txt from 1997/12

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: Today's Titus on the Met Broadcast -Reply
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 09:53:08 -0500

> From: MX%"klarinet@-----.74
> Subj: Re: Today's Titus on the Met Broadcast -Reply

> Bill Hausman wrote...
>
> It's just Mozart, not God! Operas are routinely performed with major cuts,
> concertos with personalized cadenzas, symphonies with tempos chosen only to
> be different from someone else's interpretation, etc. The earth will not
> be destroyed by this, and neither will the music.
> =====================================
>
> I couldn't agree more. This whole discussion seems to be getting a bit
> tiresome. Why not just enjoy the wonderful music performed by wonderful
> musicians and get on with your life. Enough already!
>
> Jim Sclater

Bill and Jim,
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I think that one of the most valuable things provided by this list
is for a variety of viewpoints to be displayed. It is a measure of
its excellence that one is able to solicit comments on many things,
and receive some that are anathmatic to one's own personal views.

If all we are to do as musicians is to routinely accept the interpretations
of previous generations, then any discussion other than that which
describes what those previous generations did is fundamentally
useless, maybe interesting, but still useless.

Bill says, in reference to the performance of the Titus aria, "It's
just Mozart, not God!" and Jim says that he "couldn't agree more"
and that we should simply "enjoy the wonderful music performed by
wonderful musicians."

I can understand that persepctive. I don't agree with it, but it's
an understandable view. But, there are others who think that this
sort of minutiae is very important and that how we play music from
certian periods is not at all a stagnant thing but is constantly
changing as new information, new technologies, and new research
makes itself known.

Since this list provides an avenue to present different perspectives,
I don't think that such explorations should be stifled so as to
achieve the kind of conformity that I read as desirable in Jim's note.
Now maybe I'm being too harsh. Perhaps Jim did not intend what I
read into his note, and if that's the case, I'm sorry for the misreading,
but that is the nature of written documentation. Often what it says
is not what it really should say.

Now if there were no interest in this topic, it would die its own
natural death instead of the one suggested by Jim with his "Enough
already!" There have been more than 25 notes on the subject and as
long as people keep writing on it, I think it to be a viable topic.
I read as many as 100 notes a week on reeds, another 100 on mouthpieces,
another 100 on practice material, all of which has been stated and
restated and restated again on this list over the four years that I
have been on it. And not once did I suggest, "Enough already!" I
just don't read the things that don't interest me, but I do not
suggest, nor should anyone, that a topic that they don't find
interesting or valuable is one that, therefore, should be abandoned.

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