Klarinet Archive - Posting 000149.txt from 2002/11

From: "William Semple" <wsemple@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] on the use of metaphor
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2002 02:57:15 -0500

I stand appropriately chastised, as I agree with you regarding Kell. I now
recall how controversial he was; employing vibrato among other approaches
that horrified others. The danger of generalizations in this crowd, or in
any crowd. Perhaps safe to say that none of the clarinetists I like was born
on 86th Street in NYC.

As for Karl Leister, if he wasn't a German clarinet player,
what was he? And what are the distinctions among the various styles these
days, or like the Euro, have they all been homogenized into some kind of
blob?

Nevertheless, I owe a debt to Reginald Kell (and my father, of course) for
influencing my appreciation of this instrument and making it such an
enjoyable part of my life, even though the more I am on this list serve, the
less I find I know about it. A humbling experience.

And now that I am more aware of you and your playing, a new chapter has
opened up. I assure you, I will have one of the most complete collections
of Tony Pay in Boulder, Colorado. Yo, that is saying something!

In fact, it is hard for me to choose one clarinetist over another, because
aren't clarinets in England part of a closed system, where what goes in one
end never comes out, and it is impossible to determine whether Oxford is
more important, than say, Birmingham?

In researching other English players I have recordings of (Jack Brymer and
Gervase de Peyer), I came across Peter Eaton clarinets. What's the news on
these?

p.s. Do English players like what you do?

Speaking of the English, I worked with four fine Englishmen here in a
technology company (I was CFO) for over two years. Experts all on a variety
of subjects. Except one.

At one point, we were discussing harmonics, and I mentioned in passing that
440 was Concert A, give or take a few beats.

They didn't believe it. It is C they howled. We bet $1. I won. My $1 came
folded up as a bow tie, and it is taped to my computer.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Pay" <Tony@-----.uk>
Subject: Re: [kl] on the use of metaphor

> On Sat, 2 Nov 2002 16:11:07 -0700, wsemple@-----.com said:
>
> > The first Quintet I ever heard was a recording of Reginald Kell in the
> > 1950's. So I have been enamored of the "English style," if one can be
> > so called, all of my life.
>
> I was myself an admirer, from a very early age -- 9 or 10, say -- of
> Reginald Kell. (I met Kell at around the age of 12, but didn't derive a
> great deal of benefit from it. I was simply overawed.)
>
> But what I want to say is: something that's almost always worth arguing
> against is, *generalisation*. I don't think of Kell as representative
> of anything like an 'English Style', because very few English players
> actually did anything like what he did.
>
> And I think that if you look at our previous discussion about 'relative
> importance' of bits of the clarinet/player system from that perspective,
> I think you may see that what I was doing was to argue against the idea
> that one bit of that system can be sensibly said to be 'more important'
> than another, *IN GENERAL*.
>
> Of course, one bit of the clarinet system may be more important than
> another *in particular circumstances*. It's just that, because
> everything interacts with everything else in a complicated way, we need
> to be clear about the details of the particular situation before we can
> say that anything is important, or go on to say anything useful about
> what we should do about that important thing.
>
> That's why I resist the generalisation, 'It gets less important as you
> go down'; because it's very often -- much too often -- NOT TRUE. The
> clarinet is more complicated than that.
>
> I also resist the generalisation, 'Kell represents an English Style',
> because it seems to me that it captures very little of what English
> clarinet players did then, or now do.
>
> I remember saying to Karl Leister that we English players admired many
> of the qualities of German playing, in particular the sound that he,
> Leister, made.
>
> He was horrified. "But, *I* am not a German clarinet player!" he said.
>
> Tony
> --
> _________ Tony Pay
> |ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
> | |ay Oxford OX2 6RE http://classicalplus.gmn.com/artists
> tel/fax 01865 553339
>
> ... DANGER! DANGER! Computer Store Ahead, Hide Wallet.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>

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