Klarinet Archive - Posting 000403.txt from 2001/09

From: Virginia Anderson <assembly1@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Really tough orchestral pieces
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 09:41:25 -0400

on 11/9/01 9:15 pm, Ragnhild <rkbrek99@-----.no> wrote:

> just a quick note from an "ousider..": Aren't there actually cases where a
> composer with little or no knowledge of a specific instrument might write
> parts that are (irtually or actually) *impossible* to play on the
> instrument it's written for? what do you, as an instrumentalist, do then?
> Ragnhild

Sometimes a composer's vision may go beyond current technique. For
instance, Barney Childs often said that he didn't worry when players told
him that something wasn't on the horn - he expected them to find a way to
put it on their horns. This wasn't ineptitude - Barney knew what normal
players could do and then stretched them. Brian Ferneyhough does something
similar, in that his pieces offer impossible, and sometimes contradictory,
technical demands. Brian told me some time ago that he was interested in
the music created in the attempts to reach this perfection (which probably
didn't include the cellist who told me that he merely "busked" one of
Brian's pieces rather than working it up properly).

There are a few composers who, from ignorance or ineptitude, write things
which are impossible to play. A common one is to use the Bartolozzi
fingerings for multiphonics, most of which, unfortunately, seem only to work
on Italian clarinets. The best thing to do is to talk to the composer about
this problem, and they handle it in different ways. One guy told me to find
alternatives myself. Since the piece was serial, I worked for hours to play
the piece with different permutations of fingerings, all having minor flaws
as to pitches in the set. I met up with him, ready to show him all my
alternatives. He said for me to choose my favourites (so why did he write
such a fixed piece?) but bought me some pizza as penance - so I liked him.
Another guy said that I was wrong, that he knew a "real pro" who had the
right fingering which would produce the notes required. When he gave me
that fingering it turned out to be the Rehfeldt fingering which I had
suggested would approximate it. The composer just couldn't hear that the
top pitch was lower than what he had written.

The game is to try to play this stuff to the best of one's ability, once all
attempts to fix orchestrational flaws are exhausted (if possible), and it is
letting the side down and unprofessional to do otherwise. Some years ago
one of the BBC orchestras was playing a work by one of the international
avant-garde composers and several members (some of the string players and
lower brass) were laughing and farting around on stage. It showed the
players, not the composer, to be unprofessional; if they had played it
straight, I think the judgement could have gone the other way round.

Of course, sometimes the flaw comes from clarinettists themselves. Upon
meeting him in the mid-1970s, the composer Jim Fox asked Marty Walker what
his limitations were, but made the mistake of doing so late into an heroic
drinking session when Marty was feeling especially confident. _Not a
Plenary Indulgence_, the result, was played successfully only after the
composer authorised that it could be taken down an octave.

Best,

Virginia
--
Virginia Anderson
Leicester, UK
<vanderson@-----.uk>
Experimental Music Catalogue: <http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk>
...experimental music since 1969....

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