Klarinet Archive - Posting 000614.txt from 2003/10

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: RE: [kl] Who speaks?
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 13:11:31 -0400

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 09:52:32 +0100, r.n.taylor@-----.uk said:

> Well, I've been reading this argument for some time now and it seems
> to wander backwards and forwards. One thing I haven't read is the
> suggestion that musical tastes in relation to performance change so
> radically over time, that whatever we think we 'know' about how things
> really should be done - the reality is that we are locked into the
> general perspective of our own times.

One interesting thing is to discover what may be independent of the
perspective both of their times and of our own times, because it has to
do with biological universals. That means it is what we may easily
*recognise* in our own perspective, even though currently it may not be
generally *preferred* in our own perspective.

Hence, yet again:

http://www.woodwind.org/clarinet/Study/Phrasing.html

> Whilst it is true that there's no great advantage in admitting this to
> oneself, it should, I think, hinder our attempts to extract universal
> laws about which approach to performance will necessarily lead to the
> best results.

Perhaps, though -- and in all music, not just that of the past -- it
should constrain us as to what we choose to perform.

I try not to perform pieces that require seemingly arbitrary local
decisions on my part.

Yet sometimes, subsequently, I've come to see of some of those pieces
that I *can* take a stance that enables me to make them 'work' properly,
according to my own lights, and have then performed them.

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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