Klarinet Archive - Posting 000442.txt from 2001/11

From: Roger Shilcock <roger.shilcock@-----.uk>
Subj: Re: [kl] The worth of things
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 05:58:52 -0500

You seem to be saying that you have some trust in your own musical
judgement and experience - and why not?
I take it that Simon Rattle gave an answer through his performance.
Roger S.

In message <20011112.094240.40@-----.org writes:
> 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
> --
> _________ Tony Pay
> |ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
> | |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN artist: http://www.gmn.com
> tel/fax 01865 553339
>
> ... There is intelligent life on Earth, but I'm just visiting
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>

--
It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always,
with the generality of mankind, have the preference over the accurate
and abstruse...
--- D. Hume ("An enquiry concerning human understanding," I)

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