Klarinet Archive - Posting 000118.txt from 2002/11

From: "William Semple" <wsemple@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] This thing on my front door
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 13:37:21 -0500

Bill, you rock!

----- Original Message -----
From: "William Wright" <b5w@-----.net>
Subject: Re: [kl] This thing on my front door

> 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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>

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