Klarinet Archive - Posting 000572.txt from 2002/07

From: w8wright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: Re: [kl] Scholarly Research in English Clarinet Music
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 13:32:44 -0400

<><> Robert Moody wrote:
[major snip]

Robert, what's at issue here is that the purpose of a thesis is to learn
what *you* can do independently.

Everyone communicates with other people (barring extreme handicaps), and
no person is an island, and so forth. Thus there's no problem in
proposing a specific issue and asking questions about it, such as "I
heard a key change in My Fair Lady, and I can't understand it" --- SO
LONG AS you were not assigned the task of explaining the key change
yourself.

And that's why you are meeting resistance here. Your assignment is to
identify a question *yourself* that (1) deserves investigation and (2)
has good likelihood of having an answer; and then you must go ahead and
either (1) propose and justify the answer or (2) show why the apparently
answerable question cannot in truth be answered.

You have hinted at a few dilemmas in your previous post. I don't know
enough about music history to say whether these dilemmas have been
investigated thoroughly already, but just to illustrate the thought
process:

You used the phrase "quintessential English composer" several times in
your previous messages. Well.... is there truly a national character
to English music? If so, how can it be defined? If Stanford was
Irish, why did he write in the English style?

....and most important of all, what quality do *you* see in Stanford's
music that needs explaining? If there is such a qualty, what can
*you* say about it?

Cheers,
Bill

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