Klarinet Archive - Posting 001334.txt from 1999/03

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] mistakes
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 08:33:17 -0500

On Fri, 26 Mar 1999 07:36:18 -0500, charette@-----.org said:

> What is "right" can be, and is, a complex issue, and there's the
> possibility of more than one "right" edition.

What makes me more angry is when editions destroy the questions left
open by what the composer wrote, answering those questions in a way that
blocks any answers that conform to a different playing style.

I'm thinking of, say, Reginald Kell's edition of the Mozart concerto,
and (a recent experience) Drucker's of some Weber piece.

For example, coupling editorial hairpins with a change of the composer's
slurs has led to more than a century's-worth of misunderstanding of
classical phrasing, undermining our awareness of the classical style.
Quite often such changes do much more damage than printing different
notes, because classical music often isn't very sensitive to the actual
notes, as the habit of embellishment shows.

And anyhow, the composer has sent what amounts to a love-letter down
the years to players of our instrument:-)

How would you feel if someone intercepted a love-letter addressed to
you, thought it would be better some other way, and deliberately changed
it *without letting you know*? And, moreover, did it mainly to enhance
their own prestige and earn money?

Well, how *do* you feel? Because that's what they did, and still do,
some of them.

Who cares, for example, what crescendos and dynamics the 'Trio Clarone'
think we should do in the Mozart concerto? Yet students can't help
reading their ideas in the clarinet part of the Breitkopf edition, even
if they are printed within (very tiny) brackets. And quite apart from
the presumption of including them, they're not even crescendos and
dynamics that are intelligently related to the orchestral accompaniment.

It was worse in the past, of course. How about Alamiro Giampieri, who
wrote on the Ricordi edition of the same concerto that it was
"obligatory to include his name as editor on the programme as well as
Mozart's whenever the piece was performed from the Ricordi material?"

Having been asked, and having refused, to produce such 'personalised'
editions of clarinet music myself, I blow raspberries to these guys.

Who the hell do they think they are?

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

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