Klarinet Archive - Posting 000376.txt from 2004/05

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Rosen on text and performance
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 15:07:55 -0400

Tony Pay (quoting Charles Rosen) wrote:

>Then he says:
>
>"It is the moral duty of a performer to choose what he thinks is the
>musically superior version, whatever the composer's clearly marked
>intention--it is also the moral responsibility of a pianist to try to
>convince himself that the composer knew what he was doing."
>
>The tension between the two halves of this quote represents rather
>beautifully a viewpoint that I have several times urged here.
>
>

This actually feels very similar to what one has to do in science.
Sooner or later one comes up against the need to introduce a new idea,
something outside the existing framework. And then it's your moral
responsibility to do as much as possible to try to question your own
idea, to explain the phenomenon you're observing within the existing
framework of knowledge, etc. etc. This sort of questioning of one's own
ideas really ends up being a very powerful tool for advancing one's own
knowledge. I've noticed that most of the serious frustrations I have
with colleagues---and most of the frustration other scientists feel
towards me---stems from feeling that they (or I) have shirked this moral
responsibility on some issue.

The flipside is that some people confuse questioning with "knocking
down" and end up trying to avoid having ideas so as to never have to
question them, or question their ideas so much that they never put them
forward at all. And it's probably responsible for the completely dry
and ugly writing style which pervades most scientific publications.

For various reasons I've recently been reading quite a bit on theatre
and acting, and one of the books I've been looking at is Keith
Johnstone's "Impro". He mentions something about Brecht, if an idea was
presented to him, preventing the actors from discussing reasons for the
idea and simply saying, "Try it!" .... Wanting to know what the idea
was like *in reality* before allowing intellectual discussion. It seems
a pretty good principle for rehearsal, and for scientific research.

-- Joe

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