Klarinet Archive - Posting 000061.txt from 2002/07

From: Neil Leupold <leupold_1@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Syntactical ambiguities, linguistic and otherwise
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 00:30:04 -0400

--- Bill Hausmann <bhausmann1@-----.net> wrote:

> At 06:28 PM 7/1/2002 -0700, John Betts wrote:

>> May I respectfully request that those parties interested in continuing
>> this discussion puh-leez do so privately or on a listserv more suited to
>> sociological & political debate.

> You are kind of late.

It was fascinating to me that I originally read this last sentence to mean
that Bill was complimenting John for being recently kind. Only after read-
ing the sentence that followed ("If you read the latest posts you will find
that the topic is all but exhausted.") did I grasp Bill's intended meaning.
It made me think of recent lessons with students and my efforts to commmuni-
cate to them the dynamic nature of music. There was a rhythmic issue with
one student, hung up on a sixteenth note beamed to (after) a dotted eighth.
He conceived of that sixteenth as being musically attached to the eighth
note because visually this was so, and it was plain in his execution. But
when I explained the forward directedness of the phrase, of where that rhyth-
mic figure was going, and that the 16th note was not really originating from
the 8th but rather resolving to the quarter note of the next beat, his exe-
cution of the figure changed ever so subtlely, making it clear that he had
also changed his concept of the phrase. The same thing happened to his
triplets when I explained that such figures comprised four notes rather
than three (the fourth note being the one toward which the triplet was
directed, rather than functionally originating from the one appositive
to the first note of the figure).

There was a cardinal rule in English composition classes when I was in high
school. It was decreed that artful writing flowed organically, avoiding the
distasteful weakness of compelling a reader to pause and refer back to pre-
vious material, i.e., literally back up and reread a section, in order to
grasp the meaning of his current place in the composition. It was a dog-
matic pronouncement, needless to say, and was rather limiting in its adher-
ence to convention for convention's sake. We know that in music, motives
and methods of thematic development often rely precisely upon the exercise
of taking the listener back to prior material in order to allow them to un-
derstand what they are currently hearing, although one would need to enable
them to hit a rewind button and literally relisten to prior material in
order to form a perfect analog to my literary example above.

It's all a nod to you, Bill Wright, this relationship I'm drawing between
music and language, and perhaps a mild supplication of forgivenness for my
lapse in follow-through vis-a-vis our game of extemporaneous musical compo-
sition. I'm genuinately sorry about that. It's a lot harder to write pi-
ano music than blab chattily about the silly stuff in this post.

That having been said, could someone please educate me? The composers on
the list? Tony? Others? In Western music, it's typical that the interpre-
tation of harmony flows forward rather than back, that the function of a
chord is defined not by where it originates but by where it is going, which
often justifies queer (and sometimes seemingly nonsensical) spellings.
But IS it so typical? Rhythmically, consider the theme in Rossini's Intro,
Theme and Variations for Clarinet and Orchestra. The clarinet entering
without preceding orchestral context, the sneaky player will accent the
first note to suggest that it is on a downbeat. The unwary listener will
not immediately suspect any tomfoolery from the orchestal accompaniment,
failing to identify the "trick" until the theme is stated by the clarinet
a second time immediately after the first. Only then is it completely
obvious that the theme actually begins on an upbeat. Its definition
is redefined by the context which follows. Is there ever a case, rhy-
thmically, harmonically, melodically...where preceding material is the
dominant determinant in the interpretation of function, rather than
what follows? Is music inexorably forward-directed, or do we have cases
where the listener dismisses what he just heard, what followed, in def-
erence to what came before the phrase/rhythm in question? Is the false
start in the horns, near the end of Eroica's first movement, a valid
example of this? No, I don't suppose it is, since it simply antici-
pates material that serves to confirm the function of the aborted
statement of the theme in the horns.

You know it's late and I need to hit the sack when I start rambling about
stuff like this, but if any of you have useful thoughts on the subject, I'd
be interested in distracting myself with them at work tomorrow.

Efficiency expert: "So, I understand you've been missing work over the last
couple of weeks."

Employee interviewee: "Well, I would exactly say I've been *missing* it..."

Neil

Do You Yahoo!?
Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free
http://sbc.yahoo.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------