Klarinet Archive - Posting 001068.txt from 2003/04

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] On and off topic
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 00:46:44 -0400

Pace Richard Bush, I don't think it's all that important to maintain
topicality here. What's important is to maintain 'interestingness'. Of
course, it helps if that interestingness is connected in some way with
what we do, namely the playing of music.

I regard this list as being about music, most often viewed from the
perspective of playing the clarinet. That allows for a spectrum of
viewpoints, and there are interesting connections to be made at both
ends of that spectrum. The War *is* relevant to music, and vice versa,
and it's not impossible that someone might say something interesting
about that relevance. They haven't yet, though; what people *have* said
on both sides amounts to nothing more than what you can't avoid reading
almost anywhere else, so although it's *important*, it isn't
interesting.

At the other end of the spectrum, stuff about 'which ligature?' just
makes me yawn, so I skip that too. Again, there are 'posts and posts'
about technical details; some of them are insightful, some not. No-one
says that such technical details are off-topic, but sometimes they're
well off the 'interesting' scale.

On the whole, if something isn't about the clarinet, but relevant to
music, and thus to a clarinet player, I wouldn't want to complain; so
the 'off-topic' argument doesn't bite very hard for me.

For example, to choose a current topic, anything to do with language has
a connection with music, because how we form and shape groups of notes
is related to how we form and shape syllables. To me, it was both
on-topic and interesting when Wendy pointed out that almost all Italian
words end in vowels, because I hadn't represented the situation in quite
that way to myself before.

I *had* realised that almost all Italian words end on an unstressed
*syllable*, unlike French, in which on the contrary even sentences often
end on a stressed one: "Je ne sais *pas*," but the thing about the
consonants was new to me, even if I don't agree that it provides a
reliable 'litmus test' as to whether or not a word is Italian.

That in turn is interesting musically. Something can be very pervasive
without necessarily having the status of being a litmus test. One might
well be led to ask, how pervasive is a *musical* rule? How is a
performer's breaking of a stylistic norm related to breaking a rule of
grammar? In what terms does their performance make us think it
justified, in retrospect? If they are famous enough, does what they
have done change the situation for subsequent performers? These
questions come up when you listen to great performances.

Finally, if you think about it, the very notion of 'on-topic' and
'off-topic' is an example of how we might want to exercise judgement
rather than applying a rule; and so discussion of it has a musical
relevance as well as a meta-relevance to list behaviour.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE http://classicalplus.gmn.com/artists
tel/fax 01865 553339

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