Klarinet Archive - Posting 000125.txt from 2000/06

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] McNaught and Mozart
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 17:45:13 -0400

On Thu, 01 Jun 2000 09:52:23 +0100, I wrote:

> On another tack, though, I'm surprised that Michael says that the
> review is wildly eccentric and tongue-in-cheek. I found it very
> clearheaded and honest, and I'd like to argue in another post that
> reviews like that are actually very useful to performers, and that
> this one would have been very useful to me if I'd read it when I was
> younger.

By way of entry to this -- when I was younger, I played a few times with
Christopher Longuet-Higgins, who was, and is, both a famous scientist
and a very talented pianist. I met him again a few years ago at a
college reunion dinner, and in the course of general conversation, he
said that he had a candidate for "the worst note in all music".

Naturally, I was interested to know what this note was. The answer was,
'the sixth note of 'Land of Hope and Glory' (the note that falls on the
'Glor' of 'Glory'.

"Because," said Christopher, "it's a completely crude, far too long
appoggiatura, without any elegance or motivation."

Now, though the tune of 'Land of Hope and Glory' is very well known
setting of the words, it actually has an independent musical existence
as a melody at the centre of an orchestral work by Elgar, called 'Pomp
and Circumstance March No. 3'. And indeed, the 'Land of Hope and Glory'
(LOHAG) version is quite definitely parasitic on the 'Pomp and
Circumstance' (PAC) version.

If you look at how this note first appears in PAC, you see that it's
pianissimo on the strings. So a very obvious performance choice is
to make it not even register as an appoggiatura. It's rather a very
gentle settling onto its resolution -- like a butterfly landing.

Then, when the theme returns triumphant, almost bombastic, on the full
orchestra, it's *in contrast* to what went before. And that makes all
the difference. It's like saying, "I don't care what you think. It's
beautiful anyway."

So perhaps Christopher was right that in LOHAG it was a bad note.

But I'd say that the realisation that it was perhaps a problem elsewhere
than in PAC was a stimulus to finding how in PAC itself it had its own
meaning, place and elegance.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
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