Klarinet Archive - Posting 000441.txt from 2001/11

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] The worth of things
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 04:45:46 -0500

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001 09:30:36 +0000 (GMT),
roger.shilcock@-----.uk said:

> But you can't *conclude* that the assertion is correct. Isn't that
> Dan's point?

Perhaps it is. It depends on what you use to reach conclusions. I know
that Dan would always like some sort of rational process, but I think
things aren't that simple. It seems to me that a world in which things
are either 'only' subjective, or totally capable of explication, isn't
rich enough.

Explication is always relative to some commonly accepted theoretical
framework. That won't work for me here, because I want to say that it
makes sense, after long consideration, that I still have doubts whether
elision of the Mozart bar is 'good enough' to have been what Mozart
intended. (That we can have such intuitions is part of the reason why
we find 'what Mozart wrote' to be an interesting category in the world
in the first place.)

I can give some indications why I have such doubts -- for example, the
instruments that stop, seem to stop 'too abruptly'.

You can minimise the uncomfortableness by clever playing, and in fact
I'd argue that that's the best solution. But because I have to trust my
unconscious as a determinant in *how* I play, it seems to me silly to
refuse to acknowledge its importance as an element in deciding *what*
we're going to play. After all, this relationship with the unconscious
is what players and audiences share, and is one of the reasons why music
is -- *has to be* -- mysterious in some way.

I remember asking Simon Rattle how he thought the end of Wozzeck, which
he was about to conduct, should be done. It was a silly question, but
it was at the end of a party.

"Why I became a musician, I think, was so that I wouldn't have to
*answer* questions like that," he said.

Quite.

Tony
--
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