Klarinet Archive - Posting 000119.txt from 1998/11

From: Roger Shilcock <roger.shilcock@-----.uk>
Subj: Re: [kl] Fingering Help ... etc.
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 04:14:08 -0500

Yes -- it certainly is true. That doesn't mean we should what the hell we
like with such music. Some contributors seem to have suggested we can
with, e.g., the Weber 2nd concerto in the past on this list.
Roger Shilcock

On Wed, 4 Nov 1998, Lee Hickling wrote:

> Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 07:34:57
> From: Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.Net>
> Reply-To: klarinet@-----.org
> To: klarinet@-----.org
> Subject: Re: [kl] Fingering Help ... etc.
>
> 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>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------