Klarinet Archive - Posting 000111.txt from 1998/07

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Re: Mozart and the V word
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 09:29:53 -0400

At least three different people have advanced the argument that
we could not possibly know what the performance practices were
in Mozart's day, so that the entire discussion that suggest that
these practices were important is both irrelevant and specious.

To which I can only inquire, "What planet have you been living on?"

The subject of performance practice, particularly that of the
18th century, is one of the most enormous areas of specialized
musical research. And if you start reading the literature now,
you might by 102 when you get about half way through it.

There are a ton of books written by performers and composers of the
epoch that speak in great detail about how they played the
music of their period. And to suggest that this vast body of
literature does not exist or, worse, is unimportant, is
collossol arrogance run amok.

It is also true that there is a great deal of information about
performance practice that we don't know, for example, the precise
difference between a stroke stacatto and a point stacatto, and
which repeats to take in a minuet, and whether all trills ended in
a nachschlag, or how seriously clarinet players of Mozart's day
took the details of non legato passages.

I suspect that those who offered the opinion that we don't know
anything about how Mozart and his contemporaries played his music
were really saying, "I don't know anything about it so it cannot
be very important." And that, dear friends, is a dangerous
attitude to take because it presumes that the sayer's knowledge
constitutes the common knowledge.

Someone else, in rebutting the arguments offered about the
importance of dealing with the details of performance practice
went so far as to offer some suggestion about how the music had
to come from the heart and "how we play the beginnings of
trills is not very important."

To which I can only add, that great power in music performance is
knowledge of the minutiae and details. It is also the remark of
someone who knows very little about trills and, therefore, thinks
that how one plays them is of very little importance.

Insofar as music coming from the heart, that is the kind of remark
that is heard from an amateur on the fringe of the music business.
It is a hollywood understand of music. Music comes from the head
and the heart has little to do with it.

In sum and substance, any performer who approaches K. 622 knowing
nothing about the practices of the late eighteenth century (those
practices governing how one approaches and performs works of this
nature) is simply arrogant.

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

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