Klarinet Archive - Posting 000474.txt from 2002/11

From: The Ciompi Family <deal5@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Dark Sound
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 23:55:02 -0500

I think Tony Pay has said many things best, but at the bottom of it all:
A really good clarinetist has a whole palate of sounds in order to make
his musical point. Colorful, often changing tone is what makes it so
enjoyable to listen to a true musician. If we and our "dark" sound never
wavered, the average listener would be bored at best and asleep at worse with
this series of monotonic sounds.
Color, imagination and musicality are everything, once you've established
that you've mastered the basic mechanics of playing.

Arturo Ciompi

Tony Pay wrote:

> On Mon, 11 Nov 2002 14:04:18 -0800, timr@-----.com said:
>
> > No, we don't! That's the ENTIRE point of this very long discussion.
> > There is no concensus on what "dark" means. One man's "dark" is
> > another man's "warm", one man's "velvet" is another man's "bright".
> > These are completely subjective terms. What is the opposite of
> > "dark" playing? Is it "bright"? Is it "white"? What makes it so?
>
> I think that if we were to look at a very small part of someone's
> playing, we would achieve a consensus.
>
> For example, I think we would all agree that an appoggiatura should
> almost always be 'bright', and its resolution 'dark'.
>
> On the other hand, I've sometimes thought, particularly while teaching,
> that if only we could get people to recognise what an appoggiatura is,
> why it resolves, and what bright and dark mean psychologically in that
> resolution, we'd have gone quite a long way down the road of explaining
> what musicality consists of.
>
> So perhaps it's not so simple after all.
>
> Tony
> --
> _________ Tony Pay
> |ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
> | |ay Oxford OX2 6RE http://classicalplus.gmn.com/artists
> tel/fax 01865 553339
>
> ... I think not, said Descartes; and promptly vanished.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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