Klarinet Archive - Posting 001171.txt from 2003/04

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Spelling/pronunciation/Haydn
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 00:48:27 -0400

Andy wrote:

> Tony Pay wrote:

> > There certainly seems to be the notion amongst some people that it's
> > our job to do something different from what's written; and some
> > people even think that our job is to *change* what's written, either
> > by producing an edition or by pencilling in our own markings.
> >
> > I don't think it's our job to do either of these things, as I've
> > posted here very often.
>
> Yes, you've stated this many times, but on what basis do you make
> this statement (I don't recall seeing the supporting rationale)?

Oh dear, and I thought I'd beaten the supporting rationale to death
here:-)

Here's one more shot at some of it, then.

> Granted, my knowledge of musical history woldn't even fill a thimble.
> However, it is my understanding that (as an example), when Mozart
> wrote his Clarinet Concerto, he deliberately left out much in the way
> of articulation, leaving it up to the soloist to decide.
>
> I read somewhere that, at least in the Baroque era, it was common
> practice for performers to add their own ornamentations to the
> music. Of course, just because I read it somewhere doesn't make it
> so, so it could be wrong; but on the other hand, it doesn't seem
> unreasonable, either. Can you speak to that?

Yes, that's absolutely so. And in fact, the tradition of embellishment
in that era is one of the important reasons for *not changing the text*
of the works. Because the point about embellishment is that it departs
from what is there; and the performer returns to what is there to make a
new departure the next time.

Even apart from the historical fact of embellishment, I wouldn't go so
far as to advocate adopting the cast-iron rule of limiting performance
to what the text says -- though my response to some performances would
be that they departed too radically from what the composer wrote, and
that the results didn't justify that departure. (More on that below.)
But it's also true that I don't think, particularly in later music, that
the job is to do something different from what's written -- as though
there's a part of the performance which is the performer's, and a part
that's the composer's. I wrote about that in 'Composer/Performer or
Notation/Performance?' at:

http://www.woodwind.org/Databases/Logs/2002/09/000553.txt

What I was arguing against in what you quoted above was really the habit
of *changing the text*, and then playing from that changed text; and I
was arguing even more against the habit of changing the text and then
playing from that changed text, *as a matter of course*.

You can see that there's a habit of doing that 'as a matter of course'
simply by noticing the existence of editions produced by 'famous
performers', who seem to find no inconsistency in their putting their
own opinions indelibly, in the clarinet part, in front of the next
generation of young players.

I say that, by obscuring the original composition, this practice
deprives young players of the opportunity to engage with the problems
that are their birthright. (Like, "Why did he write it like that?")
What's more, those players then think that the job is to *write in their
own stuff* on top, and never go back to the original. (I'm assuming
here, by the way, that we're talking about good music, by a composer
whose intentions are worth taking seriously. No-one, I take it, cares
what we do to *bad* music.)

> How many original manuscripts do we have of all known compositions? It
> appears to me that there is a lot of scholarly work underway to
> provide "authentic" editions of various musical works. Since it often
> takes years to produce these editions (and even then, I don't think it
> can be stated that they are 100% accurate), the source materials must
> be very difficult to come by. If we don't have the composition as
> written in the composer's own hand, how can we *really* know what was
> intended by the composer?

These are the 'problems' I mentioned above. Sometimes it's true that we
don't know the composer's intentions, and have to do the best we can
with the available evidence. However, I'd say that why we make the
effort to establish the composer's intentions is, at least in part, for
a different reason than the reason normally put forward.

That part-reason is: we try to discover the composer's intentions, not
for his or her benefit, but for our own. The problems are useful
because they begin the generation of questions, our own answering of a
sequence of which is what any one performance consists of.

Thinking of a performance in this way provides a means of getting deeper
into our *own* intentions.

If we just play 'what we like', and stick with it, we are condemned to
our current opinions. But if we struggle to make work what we think
*the composer* meant by what he/she wrote, we come up against much that
we may not understand to begin with, but that may come to be within our
understanding.

I don't just mean intellectual understanding, by the way. I mean, the
sort of understanding that engages the deep musical processes all
musicians share (performers and music-lovers alike); an understanding
that produces the conviction and rightness we feel in a good performance
of a worthwhile piece. What we have to ask is, not what do we want, but
what does *it* want? At least a part of our prompting in answering this
comes from our subconscious.

Making sense of something that seemed to be a difficulty, and finding
out how to have it seem natural both to ourselves and to an audience, is
one of the most satisfying things we can do as performers. The task
engages both our feelings and our intellect.

Now, it may be that we come to see a 'difficult' passage as being
intractable for us as it stands, and are compelled to go against what is
written.

But if so, having gone through the process of trying to make it work as
it stands gives us a much better idea of what to change, as well as how
the changed passage will relate to the rest of the work. We may even
have changed our ideas about some of the rest of the work during the
process, and seen aspects of its character we wouldn't otherwise have
considered.

It may be true, too, that part of 'the rest of the work' -- the context
of what we ourselves will play -- is the responsibility of another
player, the pianist, say; and because of what the pianist does actually
during the performance, we have to find a different response ourselves.

That's why, and this is an important point -- even if we've found our
solution to a difficult passage, perhaps even having been forced, we
think, to make some change -- then we *still* don't want to write that
change in stone. Because hearing just one more performance by someone
else may make everything different.

The comments from members of the audience after my own performances that
I've most cherished have been of the type, "I didn't realise you could
do it like that!" And as a player, I listen to the performances of
others at least in part to be able to make remarks like that to them
myself.

> Another way to state what you have said is that there is only one
> correct way to play a musical piece. Yet due to the inherent vagueness
> in much of the written musical vocabulary, I do not see how this is
> possible. "What is written" is often subject to interpretation because
> it is not explicit.

No, as has probably become clear by now, that's not what I meant; in
fact, I'm with you entirely on this one.

Music as text is always highly underspecified. (One of the reasons why
I'm interested in the business of how speech relates to its written form
is that I want to learn how, and to what extent, that's true of language
too, after reading something Roger Shilcock said that I found strange,
given my current rather small understanding of the matter.) The
relationship of text to performance is an instance of the map/territory
relationship, in which famously, not everything in the territory gets
onto the map. There are many territories that might correspond to one
map, and our job is to construct a meaningful territory corresponding to
the map. And I find that wonderful!

So another way of saying what I'm on about is: that in the classical
tradition, though not in some others perhaps, the job isn't to *change
the map*.

> For example, take a piece whose tempo marking is simply "Allegro".
> Even something as fundamental as the tempo is open to interpretation.
> What about a fermata? Exactly how long does the composer expect the
> note to be held? Again, that is open to interpretation. What about
> staccato? Exactly how short is short? Dynamics? How soft is "piano"
> (besides "louder than pianissimo and softer than mezzo-piano")? If I
> see a couple of measures marked with a crescendo and a diminuendo,
> with no dynamic marked between, exactly how loud do I get at the
> height of the crescendo?

Yup. And it's those things that allow performances that you could never
accuse of departing from the text to be completely different, one from
another.

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

...... Two wrongs are only the beginning.

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