Klarinet Archive - Posting 000032.txt from 1999/03

From: Jcadie@-----.com
Subj: Re: [kl] About authenticity
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 16:57:08 -0500

In a message dated 01/03/99 4:27:33PM, you write:

<<
Being a composer as well as performer, I have some thoughts about this HIP
thread. One must ask a few questions. What is the true intent behind
desiring
authenticity of a reality one has no experience of? Does this approach shift
the
emphasis from the music to the performance? When actors perform Shakespeare
and
his contemporaries, would it be a greater experience ifi they speak in the
exact
dialects that were spoken in the 16th century--the sounds that Shakespeare
heard? Even if you could realize that reality would you understand a word of
it? At the least, these questions concerning musical authenticity are about
surface details and have no affect on the music's qualities. Such
performances
have no affect on the musical idea: the form, melodic material and harmonic
progressions the work is based upon. It is a "crime", moreover, to add to
someone else's creation and ignorance is not an excuse. Unless there is
solid
documentation available that states that this is how the composer wanted
something to be performed and word of mouth from an "expert" who has no
concrete
evidence only that this is how "Master So and So" did it, then don't change
the
music. There is no room for guess work or adding to the music. When I went
to
music school I attended performances by HIP followers but often there was no
concrete evidence behind their decisions just an "expert label" and an ego
that
wanted to shift the emphasis from the composer's music to THEIR performance
of
it.<<

Thank you for your letter. Yes I often hear people talking about historical
accuracy performance practice, etc. and who think they have some kind of
inside knowledge on how it was actually done "back then"

I had a conversation with a fellow faculty member about a performance of the
Mozart clarinet concerto on viola. She was horrified with the thought of it
and proclaimed herself a musical "purist". I asked her if she thought it was
very authentic to be performing the piece on a modern clarinet, with modern
tuning etc. (It was of course written for bassett clarinet.) She was fairly
silent after that.

I also agree with the fact that performers often want to shift the emphasis
from the actual music to their performance. We too, as consumers, go in to a
music store now to purchase a copy of Glen Gould's interpretation of the
goldberg variations; we're not just purchasing bach. There are so many CD's on
the market to choose a Beethoven symphony from and then when we listen to it,
we talk about von Karajan's interpretation as opposed to Solti's, and so on
and so on.

Janis C

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