Klarinet Archive - Posting 000440.txt from 1998/10

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] American WW Playing
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 12:24:39 -0400

On Sat, 10 Oct 1998 11:35:18 EDT, HatNYC62@-----.com said:

> Freedom from the bar line is an important concept to understand, but
> it can be over-applied. If you listen to Tabuteau's own playing, what
> strikes you is its spontinaity and it expressiveness. Not allowing the
> bar-line to dominate one's phrasing decisions is part of this, but it
> is not the most important one! Therefore, I think that taking this
> 2341 thing out of the context of Tabuteau's whole approach to playing
> music is shortsighted and neglects all of the other virtues of his
> playing and teaching.

I'm not at all surprised at what you say here. Tabuteau was clearly a
great player. Whatever the rules of classical style are, and even if he
broke all of them, he undoubtedly justified his doing so by the results
he obtained.

Individual performances have individual quirk-quotients. Bending, and
even breaking whatever stylistic rules there are, has to be allowable,
particularly for expressive solos.

But I would still say that the 2341 idea, which I take to be the notion
that phrases *go somewhere* on the lowest level (you'll have to read my
article to understand what I mean by the lowest level) *considered as a
possible stylistic rule of classical music*, has very grave defects,
quite apart from the fact that all the historical evidence is against
it. Not the least of these defects is that when this rule is applied to
the music by all the members of an ensemble, it renders the individual
lines of a piece of classical music much less individually audible.
This subverts the full expression of classical music. Classical music
consists of individual lines, all separately audible yet nevertheless
blending in an overall effect. In other music some degree of vagueness
is often desirable, and may be essential.

The rule also destroys the interplay between the rhythmic structures.
The point about the barline, and metric structure in general, is that it
is an important organising influence. Beginning-oriented phrasing is
then an important organising influence too, that can contend with, and
sometimes defeat the organising influence of the metric structure,
effectively changing the position of the barline in one part. Harmony
is the third important bearer of tension and relaxation, which is why it
also is a rhythmic structure, that sometimes falls with, and sometimes
against the other two.

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

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