Klarinet Archive - Posting 000105.txt from 1998/11

From: Note Staff Unlimited <notestaff@-----.ch>
Subj: Re: [kl] Fingering Help ... etc.
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:56:51 -0500

klarinet@-----.org schrieb:

> This thread makes me keep thinking of a saying attributed to Beethoven. He
> is supposed to have told his piano students, "Do not be the prisoner of the
> score!"
>
> >However...I played the Liszt last spring. With the conductor's
> concurrence, the
> >clarinets played soft staccato eighths notes , and left the "ducka-ducka"
> >stuff to the flutes. It's not that we clarinets couldn't play the passage,
> >it just sounded a lot better this way!
>
> >> Ah, but now you have offended the composer by not following his
> >> instructions EXACTLY! Poor Franz will be burning out the bearings in his
> >> grave!
>
> (and so on)
>
> I've never gone deeply into musicology, but isn't it true that most of the
> scores we use are extensively edited and emended, and that in quite a few
> cases it's uncertain what the original was like, because it's lost?
> Improvisation and ad-lib ornamentation were expected during the baroque and
> earlier periods. Virtuosi of the romantic period used to take great
> liberties with tempi and phrasing, and use rubato incessantly (I'm thinking
> of pianists mostly here). Records by of the last survivors of that era,
> Rachmaninov. show that he certainly did. And as a performer, wasn't Franz
> Liszt himself reported to be far from slavish in the interpretation of his
> own and other people's work?
>
> Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.net>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's why we musicians can never be completely replaced by machines!

David
David Glenn
notestaff@-----.ch

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