Klarinet Archive - Posting 000549.txt from 1999/05

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] basset clarinet and K622
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 13:37:55 -0400

Don Christensen wrote,
>>It would be regrettable if players using normal A clarinets felt they
could no longer perform K622 with orchestra just because they are missing 4
semitones on their instruments. [snip] In the end, the most important thing
a player brings to the concert hall is musicianship and beauty. It would be
a great loss to this world if any good musician decides not to perform the
K622 just because (s)he "only" has an A clarinet to low e.>>

I agree with you, and would like to extend your thought from performance to
study, having experienced what happens when an otherwise excellent teacher
gets stuck in the saddle of the doctrinal high horse. In many years of
lessons, my piano teacher never assigned me *any* works by Baroque composers.
No Bach. No Scarlatti. No Couperin.

My teacher believed that music should be played only on the instruments for
which it was composed. He grudgingly assigned me a little bit of Mozart only
after I begged, and even then most of those lessons consisted of lectures
about why Mozart really ought to be played only on fortepiano. My teacher
wouldn't budge about the Baroque masters. He adored Wanda Landowska,
despised Glenn Gould and shuddered at the idea of playing Bach on the piano.
My family couldn't afford a harpsichord and our small house had no space for
one. (The inventory of J. S. Bach's possessions when he died included a
fortepiano. I don't think my teacher knew that. Neither did I when I
studied with him, or I probably would have tried to wheedle him into giving
me some Bach, although I haven't seen convincing evidence that Bach ever
composed specifically for fortepiano. Scarlatti also had access to a piano.
I didn't know that back in the Dark Ages, either.) IMHO the piano reductions
of Bach's organ music (rewritten by Busoni, Liszt and others) are nearly all
travesties. However, most Baroque harpsichord pieces were written to be
playable on a one-manual instrument. I *prefer* them on harpsichord or
clavichord, but most need no revision for piano.

I wanted to study keyboards in the first place because I fell in love with
the sound of counterpoint before I could talk. After the first few years of
piano study, I started studying Baroque composers on my own. By the end of
high school, I practiced them obsessionally, to the neglect of the 20th
century serialist composers my teacher favored. How I sorry I am that I
couldn't study Bach and his contemporaries with my teacher *at all* because
of his inflexibility.

I kept my little rebellion a secret. As a junior and senior, more than once
I faked my way through a lesson I hadn't practiced, because I'd been working
on a Bach keyboard suite or a Scarlatti sonata instead. The lack of
communication led to consequences. While failing to benefit from his
exceptional teaching of 20th century composers, I probably taught myself bad
habits by ignorantly practicing Baroque composers without instruction. After
the experience with Mozart, I never argued with the teacher again. He
apparently never guessed that I'd started sight-reading at lessons. I
suppose he just thought I'd reached the limit of my ability, because instead
of criticizing, he gave me the especially gentle treatment that polite people
give to hopeless cases. I wonder if it ever puzzled him that I learned the
assigned technical excercises but not the "real music," surely the reverse of
what he observed in other students.

In a recital of Baroque music, there's no place to hide, but if I tanked some
serialist composition, I figured 99% of the audience couldn't tell the
difference. So for recitals, my idea of hell on earth, I would resentfully
practice some Schoenberg just enough to get through it without too much
humiliation, while fantasizing about "showing everybody." I especially
wanted to show my teacher. Maybe instead of playing the program, I would
play a Bach suite, without even announcing it first. In a Walter Mitty
reverie, I imagined astonishment on my teacher's face as I played better than
he had ever heard me before. I never dared try to act out this fantasy.

I hid all this from my parents. I simply let them assume that my teacher had
assigned me all the Baroque fugues and canons I played, because I knew that
if I told my mother (a former professional singer and choir teacher), she
would switch me to another teacher in a flash. The other fine local teacher
was an unfriendly rival of my teacher. I liked my teacher so much that
loyalty to him overcame what I later recognized as serious incompatibility.

Today, the idea of forbidding a piano student to play the entire Baroque
repertory because the kid can't afford a harpsichord strikes me as
outrageous. That teacher tried to deny me the foundation of modern music
theory and keyboard technique. I'd like to dig him up and kick him! What on
earth was he thinking of?! No, I wouldn't really kick him. I wouldn't even
play Scarlatti at him. R.I.P.

I agree that it's *best* to play music on original instruments when possible,
but I hope teachers won't banish a composer as important as Mozart from
clarinet students' repertories when the kids can't afford basset clarinets.
Now I play Baroque and early classical music on my clarinets and on
saxophones, too, even though the saxes were invented nearly a century after
Bach and Scarlatti died. I'd love to find a good used (cheap!) clarinet in
A, or better yet, a basset, but in the meantime, I've also been working on
the Mozart concerto, on a Bb clarinet. I'd use a kazoo if that were all I
could get. The cat doesn't complain and as an irresponsible amateur, I don't
have to give a flying fandango if anybody else doesn't like the idea. It's a
big world with room enough for a lot of approaches. As long as a substantial
number of people remain nobly committed to historically correct performance
(however that's defined from one generation to the next), Mozart can survive
a few anachronisms from the rest of us.

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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