Klarinet Archive - Posting 000377.txt from 1998/10

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Three Pieces
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1998 18:26:33 -0400

On Wed, 7 Oct 1998 16:55:05 +0000, cbogott@-----.com said:

> My clarinet teacher just suggested that I order Stravinsky's Three
> Pieces as my next solo to work on. I have never heard it before. Can
> anyone recommend a good recording?
>
> Courtney Bogott

I know this doesn't answer your question, but I see others have. And if
it doesn't really apply to you, I apologise.

For a player beginning to learn a piece, recordings are mostly useful to
learn the context in which you'll be playing. If you want to learn a
piece for clarinet and piano, and can't do so with a pianist, it can
help to listen to, or even play along with, a recording.

This is even more true of pieces involving more players, of course. I
recently had to play a performance of the Francaix clarinet quintet, a
piece that I didn't know, and had never heard, with a quartet that had
played it several times before, rehearsing just on the afternoon of the
concert because they were coming from another concert abroad.
(Actually, it was worse than that -- we only had an hour on the quintet,
and there was a disaster with the music for the rest of the concert,
involving faxing parts...) Fortunately, it's a straightforward and
charming piece, and so I did what will probably horrify some people
here: I 'played along' with a record several times, and really
familiarised myself with the bits that are rhythmically tricky for
ensemble. I was able to have 'already in my ear' everything the quartet
did during our limited rehearsal, even though I didn't like, and we
therefore didn't follow, some of the decisions of the players on the
record.

This is very important too: you have to get into the habit of listening
to recordings you use in this way with a critical ear. You have to say
to yourself, what doesn't work about this? How could this be better?
Why don't they play what's written there? And so on. If you're a
player, you have to do this anyway when you listen to yourself, in order
to improve.

Of course, it's a dangerous attitude to take, because it means that you
can start to listen to all performances *for what's wrong with them*,
and find it difficult to enjoy the music for its own sake. Rather like
Mark Twain and the Mississippi.

Now in your case, I'm going to argue the opposite. You'd have to say
that you don't *need* to listen to a record to find this sort of
context. There's only you.

So, perhaps, it might be worth at least starting by doing exactly what
Stravinsky says as you play it through (he's pretty explicit that you
should follow all his instructions) trying all the time to find what
contexts, what ways of thinking about the piece, make it work, make it
come alive. That way, when you listen to other people playing, you'll
already have asked some of the questions that they may be providing the
answers to. (Of course, you may think that they haven't provided
adequate answers, which is also very useful. Like, I don't really know
how to play this, but anyway, not like *that*!)

The trouble with doing it the other way is that it's rather like looking
at the answers in the back of the book before you really work on the
problems. Not in this case that they are *the* answers.

Because I think the model for what you're doing should be very much more
like what you do when you read a bedtime story to a child than what you
do when you try to find out THE RIGHT WAY TO PLAY STRAVINSKY'S
MASTERPIECE ACCORDING TO THE GREATEST EXPONENTS OF THE INSTRUMENT IN THE
WORLD. <Spit>.

Just a few things to think about:

Stravinsky said they were 'snapshots' of improvisations.

Why is the loudest dynamic in the second piece, mf?

'How many people' are there in each of the movements?

Following on from this last, what high-level analogy might there be
between these three pieces and the three movements of the Schumann
Fantasiestucke?-)

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE
tel/fax 01865 553339

... Today is cancelled due to lack of interest!

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