Klarinet Archive - Posting 000314.txt from 2004/06

From: ormondtoby@-----.net (Ormondtoby Montoya)
Subj: RE: [kl] Mozart Forgeries
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 00:12:54 -0400

Nancy Buckman wrote:

> Someone will probably beat me too this, but
> the joke is the 6/22 and K.622.

Somehow, there's a moral in this that applies to understanding music.
If I may ramble for a moment:

<embarrassed grin> For the record, I did figure out the K.622
association about 10 minutes after I posted my original question, and [I
swear! ] I had not seen any of the replies yet.

Thus, my "duh" post was in chastisement of myself, not of anybody's
reply.

Afterwards, I spent several minutes trying to figure why it had been so
difficult for me to see the answer. (I had wondered if some piece of
Mozart's music was 6'22" in length, or if it had something to do with a
62mm barrel that was 0.2mm too long, or if....) This shows how
powerful 'context' can be. If you look back at my posts, I always type
"K.622", never "the Mozart Clarinet Concerto". Yet the association
with K.622 sailed past me unnoticed, even when I was trying hard to
figure it out.

I think that the "/" in 6/22 put me into a mathematical or measurement
context, which prevented me from seeing it as a title.

In a similar way, I'm sure that each of us has wondered, on occasion,
why the person in the next seat does or doesn't appreciate a
performance. The person's personality is a major context element, of
course --- not to mention the sort of music that the person was
expecting, or had been listening to while driving to the performance,
or recent events at home, or the state of one's digestion, and so forth.

I remember in history class in grade school, I said something extremely
foolish, and the teacher told me: "You'd better not go into the forest
because the squirrels will get you!"

I sat there and I wondered: "What's that supposed to mean? How do
squirrels and forests relate to the history we're studying?"

For some reason, this incident continued to bother me, off and on, for
most of my young life. Several times each year, I would wake up in the
middle of the night, trying to figure it out. Occasionally I dreamt of
squirrels reading text books, searching for the answer. It wasn't
until my senior year at college --- I had three room mates, and we slept
in bunk beds jammed into one small room --- when I awoke with a start in
the wee morning hours, I sat straight upright and I crashed my head into
the metal rail above me, and I cried out in full voice:

"Yeee-ooowww! I've got it! Squirrels eat nuts, and I'm nuts !!!!"

My room mates thought I *was* nuts, of course.

To this day, I still wonder what bit of context finally allowed me to
resolve my dilemma. I'll probably never know.

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