Klarinet Archive - Posting 000279.txt from 2002/10

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Copying
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2002 10:49:24 -0400

Tony Pay wrote,
>My main issue was about the inadvisability of
>writing what someone else did *into the text*.
>
>The text/performance relation is an example of
>the map/territory relation. Famously, the map
>isn't the territory, and not everything in the
>territory gets onto the map.
>
>Speaking roughly, performance is about creating
>a territory that corresponds to the map. It's
>wonderful that there are different territories that
>correspond to the same map.
>
>Performance, though, is not about *changing the map*.
>Or, not in the classical tradition, anyway.

Yes. I also think there's a huge difference between interpreting during a
live performance (even interpreting pretty far outside the lines), and
preparing a printed edition that ossifies an interpretation, as a variant
text. Variants in editions of the original work bother me, while
transcriptions don't, even if they're fairly loose. Ravel's orchestration of
Mussorgsky's piano piece, "Pictures at an Exhibition," strikes me as a highly
successful piece in its own right, arguably as fine a composition as the
original. Ravel stated honestly what he'd done and claimed his own work.
His edition shouldn't confuse anybody about Mussorgsky's original intent.

But I do have a big problem with editions that purport to be authentic or
even ur-texts, when in reality the editor is an interpreter who imports
editorial opinion into the document. It doesn't help much when an honest
editor annotates the changes scrupulously, since the annotations give such a
patina of scholarly respectability to the alterations, while the original,
reduced to a footnote, is easy to overlook. History gets distorted that way,
because published editions *replace* the original text for most musicians.
Until harpsichordist and scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick began publishing his fine
editions of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas in the mid-20th century, the Carl
Czerny edition of 1839 ("less carefully annotated, hence less disturbing than
his editions of Bach," Kirkpatrick notes with wry humor in his book,
_Domenico Scarlatti_, Princeton U. Press, 1953) and the Alessandro Longo
edition of 1906 were far and away the most popular texts of Scarlatti, though
they're crammed with misbegotten editorial "improvements"--and several
less-popular editions were even worse.

BTW, speaking of interpretive performance, yesterday a cricket loudly
accompanied the clarinet simulacra coming from my computer. The chirping
clearly *related* to what the cricket heard. He was answering! Every time I
went looking, to evict him to the back yard where he belonged, he stopped
chirping and I couldn't find him. Meanwhile, Shadow Cat kvetched around my
feet, nagging me to stop making the computer sound like nasty screech-sticks
and give her an early dinner. I ignored her . . . until she found my
keyboard cover lying on the floor and puked up a large, wet, gooey cricket
corpse into it. I think she was even more annoyed when I burst out laughing,
but can anybody get mad at a cat for such perfect communication? Now that,
if you like, was a text / performance relation, if not exactly in the
classical tradition.

Lelia

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