Klarinet Archive - Posting 000717.txt from 2000/08

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] I'm playing quietly, but....
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 16:45:05 -0400

On Wed, 23 Aug 2000 07:40:18 EDT, MVinquist@-----.com (Ken Shaw) said:

...Loads of very good stuff about Beethoven 8 third movement; right on
the button!

Brilliant!

The stuff I have to add is:

I find that the trio works best if I play it a bit 'crazily'. Not all
conductors will buy this, but the 'cello accompaniment, plus all those
funny crescendos and subito pianos, *are* a bit off the wall, aren't
they? And 'our' solo is a sort of decoration of the horn melody, to
begin with at any rate; and one that you can phrase in a way that isn't
as 'bar by bar' as the horns. They lollopingly dance, you crazily sing,
in crescendo.

So sometimes I do phrase against the harmony, contra Ken's principle, in
order to show this craziness, because I think the slurs quite often
justify that (at the end, for instance, see below).

Technically I'd only want to add one thing that made a big difference to
me when I noticed it was probably true, and then took it seriously when
playing.

It's that the diminuendo at the end is a diminuendo of *words*, or
'groups of notes', not of notes.

If you say, "Quieter, quieter, quieter," making a diminuendo, you hear
that each successive "quie-" is less than the preceding one. However,
each "quie-" is louder than the *preceding* "ter".

This sort of diminuendo is what may occur in the final clarinet bit; Ken
said the right sort of thing for me when he wrote:

> The D must be mezzo forte, the B must be mezzo piano, and the G must be
> only piano.

...but I'd rather have the B even quieter than the final G, so that D-B
is *one* thing, like D-b.

The best way to see how this might be plausible is to think in terms of
the structure of speech. No sentence is really good enough to capture
what's possible, but the best I can come up with off the cuff at the
moment is:

"I'm playing quietly, but..also.., very....true."

...where 'true' is louder than the 'ry' of 'very', but quieter than the
've-' of 'very'.

And the three groups of three quavers 'I'm playing', 'quietly' and 'but
also' can have a *very* slight beginning stress, diminishing as we
progress, till we get to the final two duplets, in keeping with the
slight craziness I mentioned earlier.

The technique of doing this 'modulated' diminuendo is, of course, to use
support, as well as the voicing techniques that Ken mentions.

BTW, I have to play it in a Promenade concert with the OAE tomorrow
night on a 9-key clarinet, with natural horns, so it's an appropriate
moment to discuss it!

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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