Klarinet Archive - Posting 000113.txt from 2002/11

From: b5w@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: Re: [kl] This thing on my front door
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 13:03:10 -0500

There are two chains of thought in this discussion that need to be kept
separate. Much of the argument is caused by confusing the two of them.

As Tony has pointed out several times, it makes a difference which
question you ask. **BUT MOST IMPORTANT**, sometimes a particular
question always produces an irrelevant or misleading answer, and other
times there's room to ask more than one question.

One chain of thought has to do with 'mechanism' or 'cause and effect'.
How does <whatever> happen?

The other chain of thought has to do with final outcome. Regardless of
how the final outcome was caused, does one fault ruin the entire thing?

In the first case, if I hear an unpleasant note, I may say to myself:
"It would've been OK if only <whatever>". I may go so far as to say:
"It was only a small mistake, I can ignore it." Such statements are
equivalent to dividing the total event into details and identifying the
'importance' of each.

In the second case, I may say to myself: "That was wrong." This is
equivalent to the lock-and-key metaphor. If it's bad, then it's bad.

There are situations where a musician must ask: "What went wrong?" or
"How important is this one tiny defect?" But there are also situations
where the answer is: "Several things went wrong all at once, and they
interacted with each other in a way that cannot be fixed by changing
only one of them. I reject this combination of techniques as totally
unsalvageable. I will never <whatever> and <whichever> at the same
time again."

Let's examine two common examples from real life which (I'm sure) has
happened to most, or even all, of us:

First, when a certain reed and a certain mouthpiece don't work together,
which is the more 'important' cause? If you find that a different reed
works with the mouthpiece in question, and you also find that a
different mouthpiece works with the reed in question, which do you
blame? The mouthpiece or the reed?

Presumably, you say: "These two don't work together."

Second, when your pitch on a particular note is wrong, you may identify
a mistake in your embouchure or breath or clogged hole or leaking pad or
whatever. So long as the note doesn't fall apart completely when you
'fix' this mistake, you can say to yourself: "I identified the
particular cause, I determined how much correction was needed, and I was
careful not to alter anything else. My analysis of relative
contributions to the final outcome was successful."

In summation, I think that there is sound thinking in both approaches,
and if you are to be a complete musician, you must be prepared to take
both into account.

Cheers,
Bill

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