Klarinet Archive - Posting 000728.txt from 2003/02

From: b1rite@-----. Rite)
Subj: Re: [kl] Shepherd on the Rock
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 13:51:03 -0500

<><> Neil=A0Leupold wrote:
Are the audiences of today musically sophisticated enough [....] I'm
referring more to American audiences here, and perhaps the state of
musical awareness and appreciation is different in Europe.

You bet it is !!!! (but see my final paragraphs even if you skip past
my anecdote, which I believe I have posted here once before)

Once I attended an outdoors concert on the edge of a harbor in Sweden.
Hundreds of (perhaps a thousand?) families & kids with picnic baskets
sitting along the shore and a full symphony orchestra arrayed in front
of us.

The U.S. has similar Fourth of July celebrations of course, but.....

First of all, it surprised me that the music at a centennial celebration
(founding of the city) would be entirely symphonic classical without any
pop or folk music --- despite the audience being strictly Mom & Pop &
picnic baskets, which one family invited me to share (and a few young
folk shed their clothes as if it were a rock festival - I wasn't
prepared for that).

Secondly, a large ferry boat happened to chug by while the orchestra was
playing a choral piece. The ferry went into a circle and looped past
the concert site. The passengers sang along with the professional
chorus, loudly enough and clearly enough and sufficiently in tune that
they complemented (rather than interfered with) the orchestra's chorus.
I cannot imagine a ferry boat in the U.S. looping a second time just to
hear and sing along with a concert, and I can't imagine the passengers
thereon singing Shepherd on the Rock well enough to complement the
professional musicians.

I did ask the family who invited me to share their picnic basket if the
ferry boat was part of the show. The housewife looked at me in
surprise and said, "No, everybody knows this music, don't you?" All I
could do was look sheepish and ask,"What is the title of this music?"
She answered me with the Swedish title, and therefore I still don't know
what it was.

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

...anyway, Neil, I _would_ like to say that regardless of whether the
audience 'knows' the music or the lyric's language, I firmly believe
that if a composition is well-written, it hangs together in such a way
that the audience feels that it is "right" when played one way and
"wrong" when it is played another way --- even if the audience cannot
verbalize that the crescendo was not appropriate because <whatever>.

I fully appreciate that I am defeating my own arguments when I say this.
I've always felt (and argued here on the list) that a musician should
play the music 'his/her own way'. But if there is a 'best way', then
playing it another way should be a mistake.

Despite the fact that Tony posted one particular argument a year ago
that really rang a bell with me, I still have emotional problems with
this issue, and I probably always will. Probably this is why music is
exciting. A conflict of sorts is built into music, perhaps into every
art form. Perhaps it's similar to an accidental in a strongly tonic
composition.

As someone once said: 'Tis a puzzlement.

Cheers,
Bill

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