Klarinet Archive - Posting 000765.txt from 2002/04

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] Articulation in context
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 08:22:49 -0400

On Thu, 25 Apr 2002 19:47:51 +0200, paolo.leva@-----.se said:

> Tony Pay wrote:
>
> > Of course, the problem only arises if you think that the
> > Baerenreiter is 'underspecified' with regard to articulations.
>
> No I don't. I am still a student and have not enough experience to
> judge any edition as "wrong" in any sense. It's still a long way
> before I can dream of performing this pieces, but I find this
> discussions useful to build a cultural background against which to
> choose my editions, my articulations and my interpretations later on.

The truth is, everything that's *really* important about playing is
missing from any 'edited' edition. You want to start from our best
guess at what Mozart actually wrote, and go on from there.

I'd encourage you to develop your feeling for 'what's wrong' in both
editions and performances, regardless of your level of expertise in
playing. After all, the Mozart was written not for clarinet players,
but for audiences, and most of them can't play the clarinet at all.

Having a feeling for 'what's wrong' amounts to having a feeling for both
'what works' and 'what's missing', and these formulations are probably
more useful. In order to 'work', a performance has to satisfy quite
general criteria of coherence, balance, variety and so on. Now, there's
no denying that experience of a number of different ways of doing
something helps us to decide which one we want. (Sometimes, we can't
imagine that a passage could be as successful in performance as *that*
-- until we hear 'that' actually done.) But still, at any point in our
development, the habit of listening for 'what's missing' is what drives
us forward. So it's worth developing that habit.

When I say, 'what's missing', I don't mean, physically missing,
necessarily. In a performance that you feel has too many accents,
what's missing for you might be something like, 'a sense of flow', or
'impersonality', or any quality that the music actually wants or needs
to have that the accents are currently blocking.

Take that bar 13 that I described. Just as an example, I'm going to
construct a way of thinking about playing it that I've never actually
used, in order to illustrate the sort of considerations that might lead
to a choice of articulation.

If you use the 'slur two, tongue two' (STTT) articulation to break up
the two in a bar rhythm for the first halfbar, you're heightening a
division that's actually already there. This is because the first half
of the bar contains a repeated note-pattern G'F'D'B', then GFDB. If on
the other hand you play all staccato or all legato, you can use the long
sweep of the phrase to obscure that repetition, which is impossible if
you use STTT.

Now imagine, or play, bar 13 in the context of the bars surrounding it.
First of all, this bar marks the emergence of the solo line into the
foreground after a few bars accompanying the orchestra. A simple
dominant 7th arpeggio is a not very characterful statement with which
to do this, one might think, which perhaps explains why it's commonly
played with an injection of drama and virtuosity, even though it's not
one of Mozart's most original ideas:-)

But now, consider. This arpeggio is essentially unaccompanied, and so
bears a relationship to the next unaccompanied bit, in bar 15, which
consists of two chromatically filled in rising thirds (that number 3
again!), namely (E'F'F#'G') and (B'C'C#'D'), each beginning an eighth
note 'off-the-beat'. This off-the-beat rhythmic pattern is echoed at
half-speed in the orchestral accompaniment to bar 16, and so is a
feature of these bars.

It's difficult to point up this feature without sounding quirky, though,
because the passage is essentially a 'relaxing' one.

However, if you make the beginning of bar 13 a surprisingly *rhythmic*
gesture, by doing STTT very definitely, then that's retrospectively
justified by pointing up bar 15, and allows that way of playing bar 15
to make more sense. And you can help all that by asking the orchestra
to make the 'cha-cha-cha' accompaniment to the last half of bar 13 and
bar 14 especially clear.

Expanding the context further, we can see that bars 9-12 are quite
smooth and legato, 'sewn together' by the clarinet obbligato, so it
works to have bars 13-16 more 'choppy' and rhythmic, with a motion back
towards smoothness that is interrupted by bars 17-18.

So, that's a context that might have an influence on how you articulate
bar 13.

At this point I have to say that I've never, *ever* used STTT at bar 13!
Nor indeed have I, until today, represented the argument above to
myself.

Notice, you can still do everything I've described above without STTT.
It's perfectly possible to modulate G'F'D'B'GFDB so that it's clearly
two gestures, even if you play it all staccato.

> I also believe that it is very dangerous to let the technical
> difficulties to guide your articulation in earlier stage, the risk is
> that even after overcoming these difficulties you stick to that
> articulation because it is just there, in your fingers.

I think (I hope!) you underestimate yourself. If you stay in touch with
what lies behind a choice of articulation, then you'll never get stuck
in the way you describe.

> Much better to play much slower and with the proper articulation. But
> on the other hand if you play fragmentary and at a slower tempo it
> gets very difficult to get an overall sense of the composition to make
> the "right" choices regarding balance and articulation... I find this
> a difficult dilemma, with no obvious solution.

Slow practice is always a help.

A thing I'd like to point out to you, though, is that articulation is
only one of many tools we have for showing relationships, and music is
all about showing relationships. Relationships live *in our heads*,
nowhere else. Tone colour, dynamics and so on can stand in for, if not
entirely replace articulation.

Whether it's true or not, I can't remember who told it to me, I like the
story that Sabine Meyer (like me) had trouble with staccato as a
student. Hans Deinzer reputedly told her *not to play staccato* for six
months.

It clearly worked, and I bet she learnt *a lot* in those six months.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE http://classicalplus.gmn.com/artists
tel/fax 01865 553339

.... Who the hell is General Failure? And why is he reading my drive!

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