Klarinet Archive - Posting 000276.txt from 2001/11

From: Oliver Seely <oliver-seely@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Yes We Have No Bananas vs. Beethoven 9
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 13:18:23 -0500

I had a recent pleasant encounter with a violist friend and her pianist.
We played Beethoven's Opus 11 trio, Mozart's Kegelstatt trio and four of
Bruch's eight pieces. Then, knowing that I had both Beethoven's Opus 20
septet for winds and strings and its reduction, the Opus 38 trio, in my
box, I talked them into trying that one, using the trio music for the piano
and clarinet, but the viola part from Opus 20 (Opus 38 is for piano,
clarinet and cello). My friend complained that the septet viola part was
simply a "tick-tack" part, lots of sawing for accompaniment, so in recent
days I've sequenced the cello part for the trio (then changed from the bass
to the alto clef), but using the copy and paste feature of Finale,
essentially redoing what Beethoven did for the cello when he reduced the
septet to a trio. It was an interesting exercise because very little of
the Opus 38 shows any creativity at least as regards the cello part, which
is about equal parts cello and bassoon from the septet and to a much lesser
extent about equal parts viola and French horn. Every so often his
creative juices got going with short strains that are not found in the
septet, but the biggest offering emerges in the 5th movement, the Scherzo,
which in the septet has somewhere around a 10 measure repeat toward the
beginning with the melody given to the French horn. Beethoven gave the
first strain to the piano and the second to the cello as an echo, keeping
the total number of played measures the same.

This doesn't begin to address the subject of "better or best", but I found
the process to be a valuable exercise because I felt that I had exposed a
great composer if not as a formula hack at least one who submerged his
greatness temporarily likely with the constraint of time to grind out the
reduction for an upcoming performance. I could be completely wrong on this
point. I don't have the master's biography in front of me or notes on the
reduction or where it was first played, but I got some perverse delight in
observing the same formula approach that I had previously discovered in the
Reicha quintet which I sequenced a couple of years back and the 13 partitas
of Franz Krommer. Krommer delighted me in an opposite sense: just as soon
as I figured I could copy and paste one staff to another with a third
transposition up or down and some manual shifting here and there to
fourths, Krommer surprised me with an original part which I'd then have to
return to and enter manually. Mozart remains for me the most original. I
can't copy and paste anything of his because there is too much manual
clean-up after doing so. It's easier simply to put everything in note by
note at the outset.

Oliver

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