Klarinet Archive - Posting 000076.txt from 2001/09

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Re: bellison and k. 622
Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2001 10:06:57 -0400

On Sun, 02 Sep 2001 08:57:36 +0100, assembly1@-----.com said:

> Several years ago an interdisciplinary arts course I taught in about
> British Victorians did a section on productions of the _Messiah_ in
> the latter half of the nineteenth century and the way it was perceived
> by the people of the time.

And of course, there's the Mozart arrangement. That's not been done on
classical period instruments as far as I know, although we have
talked about doing it.

> Now that we may be historically distant enough, though, has anyone
> thought to mount a Norrington/Age of Enlightenment Orchestra-type
> reconstruction of a 19th-C. performance, using the Bellison (and
> perhaps other early editions)? Or are we not distant enough?

As usual, the difficulty is that the most important parts of such an
enterprise are precisely the things that can't be captured in what is
written down. (See Robert Philip's book, 'Early Recordings and Musical
Style: Changing Tastes in Musical Performance 1900-1950', which shows
clearly that the performers we can hear on early recordings very often
were playing under assumptions that were quite contrary to how we
nowadays read what was written in their editions, and even contrary to
what they themselves *said* they did.)

My own view is that in the absence of very clear indications of what
previous performers thought the music wanted, our only solution is to
look at what we *ourselves* can most surely say that the music wants;
and then try to follow that. The character of the instruments of the
time can of course often be a clue to finding 'what the music wants'.
For me, that classical music needs to be played clearly and
transparently is evident from looking at the part-writing, and
nineteenth-century traditions probably went against that, because for
them, what was important about the music was something different -- like
its heroic or extra-musical meaning, for example.

What *that* means is that any attempt I might make to play the Mozart
concerto with the sensibility of a 19th century performer would be bound
to be sterile, since it couldn't include my own instincts about the
music itself. Playing is a multi-level enterprise, to do with our
unconscious as well as our conscious selves.

>From this viewpoint, who *cares* what Simeon Bellison *thought*? That's
quite independent of what he *did* as a player, which I suppose must
have been to make the music be alive, in some way that was his own.

You certainly can't capture that in an *edition*.

Tony
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