Klarinet Archive - Posting 000227.txt from 2002/10

From: Daniel Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Saying what you want
Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 11:49:21 -0400

Tony Pay wrote:

> If you were in the position I often am, though, of giving lessons to
> students who come with their music plastered with pencil markings that
> bear little or no relation to their understanding of the piece, and
> trying to get them back to some contact with music that they might
> regard as their own, but don't at all; then you would understand better
> why I want to argue against, not you, but the advice you give.

It is interesting that Tony should make this statement at this time
because a copy of the latest issue of the newsletter of the Mozart
Society of America arrived in my mail yesterday and it contains an
article by Bob Levin that argues very forcefully on that subject.

While Levin's paper speaks of performing Mozart's keyboard music, it
goes straight for the throat of the belief that (in this case as well as
almost all periods) the music requires that kind of personal editorial
emmendations, and that without it you don't have a clue to what the
piece is about. And in support of that view, a quote is given by one
Sigmund Lebert who, in 1871, wrote the following: "The signs of phrasing
and articulation, so necessary to correctly indicate the structure of a
composition, are carefully amplified in [the edition which I have made].
The utter inadequacy of such notation in the manuscripts of Mozart's
time was a deplorable practice of that period. This was undoubtedly due
to instrumental liminations."

And it is exactly the belief that "today we really know ..." that causes
players to presume that what the composer has written is insuffiently
well-described so as to allow proper performance. So they create
additions of the type spoken of by Tony, because they fail to understand
the notation of the composer as taken in the context of the practices of
the era.

It's an article worth reading and it gives, as a remarkable example, the
music of the first 8 measures of the second movement of Mozart's piano
sonata in C, K. 545 in both Lebert's edition (heavily emmendated) and
what is suggested to be an urtext edition.

The bottom line of this, in Levin's words, is that "standardized
solutions to performance are not an artistically acceptable substitute
for musicians' thinking about the content and meaning of the pieces they
play."

--
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**Dan Leeson **
**leeson0@-----.net **
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