Klarinet Archive - Posting 000598.txt from 1999/05

From: Rachael <davidor@-----.il>
Subj: Re: [kl] basset clarinet and K622
Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 03:52:03 -0400

I know of a fantastic (cheap) clarinet in A that is for sale . . . if
you are
willing to take a trip to the Holy Land of Jerusalem to buy it. You can
reply
privately.

Rachael Orbach
davidor@-----.il
Jerusalem Israel

LeliaLoban@-----.com wrote:

> 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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