Klarinet Archive - Posting 000753.txt from 2001/09

From: Virginia Anderson <assembly1@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Re: Bernstein Sonata
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 04:13:36 -0400

on 22/9/01 9:15 pm, "Michael Bryant" <michael@-----.uk> wrote:

> Bernstein Sonata 1941-2. The composer was 23 and he was
> pleased with his first published piece.
> The 'student period' influence was that of Hindemith in the
> Gazioso. He admitted to having bought a clarinet in pawnshop
> in 1939 and fooled around with it a bit.

Fascinating! The Bernstein 1st movement "feels" like the first movement of
the Hindemith in one's fingers, the voicing and texture of the piano as
well, but the approach to harmony is different (at least as I mind-play it).
The Hindemith Sonata would have been hot off the press when Bernstein bought
that clarinet, if not available to him just soon after. A lot of American
composers of that generation and just younger went through a Hindemith
phase: the music must have seemed so very striking to them when new (as it
did to me when I first heard it). I've never gone through the psychology of
my aesthetic disappointment in the Bernstein, but perhaps it was that I
encountered it at 17 just after I did the Hindemith and so it felt like a
let-down.

> Taking a swipe at a selection British-resident composer does not
> really help. A convincing list of less successful music would be
> constructed differently. Horovitz was born in Austria.
> Stanford was born in Ireland, and Finzi's family was Jewish/Italian.

Good point. The question of national identity becomes especially slippery
when one then adds the question of influence. There is a joke, for
instance, that Aaron Copland was the greatest French composer America ever
had due to his studies with Boulanger (and there are certain stylistic
family resemblances in all her students). This doesn't detract, however,
from Copland's rightful place as one of the developers of the Great American
styles of the 20th century (especially of the sounds we associate with the
West and the plains, not too shabby for a French-educated Jewish New
Yorker).

Another example of the elusiveness of national identity is in the work of
Percy Grainger, whose _A Lincolnshire Posy_ (and some contemporaneous works)
is as green and as pleasant as any piece by many of the native members of
the Second British Renaissance (jokingly referred to as the "cow-pat"
school). Of course he was a German-educated Aussie in Britain, who moved to
the US and was married in the Hollywood Bowl.

Cheers,

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

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