Klarinet Archive - Posting 000146.txt from 2003/10

From: "Don Hatfield" <dhatfield@-----.org>
Subj: Re: [kl] What to do
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 11:35:27 -0400

This goes along with what my clarinet instructor in college said to me in a
lesson along with a female student one morning many years ago...I was
studying the first Brahms Sonata, and he kept yelling "passion, passion,
you've got no love in your expression.!" When the young lady beside me asked
if he could describe what he meant more clearly, he looked at me and said "I
mean the passion of the soul and mind, not the passion you two would have in
the back seat of the car at a drive-in on Saturday nights."

She blushed for days when she passed me in the hall after that one.

Don H.

> I wasn't trying to be facetious when I said that, though it may have
sounded that way. What I had on my mind was that people grasp the idea of
passion at different stages. I'm not talking about sex. I talking about
real passion, which can have many facets.

> In the case of sex (and I'm speaking of men here, though this may be true
of women, too) any teenager who gets an erection believes he understands
passion. But real passion is not in the crotch, it is in the head and that,
in my case at least, took me quite a while to figure out.
>
> In the case of the passion of Brahm's clarinet quintet, all of the
composer's extraordinary eroticism needs to be in the head of the player. In
my case that took me a number of years to figure out.
>
Now maybe Tony was a faster starter than me. But I have a recording I made
of the f-minor Brahms at 20 and it embarasses me to hear it. All that
groping in the dark and heavy breathing and constant moaning. It was 100%
crotch playing and 0% mature, adult passion.

But then again, I was a slow learner.

There is an old adage that says, "The most sexual organ in the body is the
brain."

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