Klarinet Archive - Posting 000960.txt from 2004/07

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Clarfest - my observations
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 09:29:48 -0400

David Blumberg wrote,
>I also went to Clarfest and had a great time.

I enjoyed meeting you there!

>My only complaint was that there was way too much
>"academic modern" music performed.

An imbalance between old and new, as such, doesn't bother me. Did the
various performers have any way of knowing in advance who would perform
what? People who attend every year probably get wary of repeating the
same programs other people have played; and I'm sure none of them wanted to
land on a list of 17 clarinettists all playing the same Brahms sonata. By
premiering new works, they could be sure they wouldn't all show up at the
party wearing the same musical dress.

To me, Theodore Sturgeon's Law, "Ninety percent of everything is crap,"
didn't hold true for the new compositions premiered at ClarinetFest,
probably because the performers had already gone through the crap and
tossed out most of that ninety percent, before they decided what to
program. Most of the new music (with a few exceptions, most of them boring
and derivative rather than annoying) was better than I expected, and I
thought some of the new music was brilliant. I loved Scott Wright's music
for clarinet and electronic instruments for the "Extreme Clarinet" recital
he performed with Robert Spring, and also Hidemi Mikai's "Duo Capricioso,"
performed by the composer (I think "Midemi" in the program was a typo,
wasn't it?) with Yasue Sawamura.

>Composers have taken atonality and to me ruined their music.

I know what you mean by atonality, but I resist using that word. Maybe I'm
being pedantic, but everything that makes a sound has a tone. I prefer
terms such as "non-traditional harmony" to indicate that we're outside the
48.

>There wasn't at all (to me) a good balance between the
>standard works and what I heard. Sure, a concert or 2
>devoted to that stuff is interesting, but when I'm hearing it
>all day, I get tired quite quickly of it.

I do get fed up, fast, with banal imitations of early 20th C. serialists,
although I didn't hear much of that sort of thing at ClarinetFest (possibly
because I favored workshops over concerts and missed a lot of the
performances, including all that happened in the evenings). Fortunately,
enough time has passed for the *good* early serialist music to start
floating to the top, leaving the bilge to sink to the bottom and be
forgotten, but unfortunately now we're getting the copycats who imagine
nobody will take them seriously unless they produce their quota of triple
forte shrieking and popping noises in bad imitation of Schoenberg. We've
got a little serialist mafia among the chat group users on the Sibelius
self-publishing site. They dump all over anybody who uses traditional
circle of fifths harmony, as old-fashioned. Sheesh -- and serialism
*isn't* old- fashioned?! It's their great-grandfather's new music. People
who still imagine that serialism is new need to wake up and smell the 21st
century.

But for me the most common fault in the music I heard at ClarinetFest was
predictibility and repetitivness, best exemplified by the Shin-ichiro Ikebe
composition, "Clarinet Solo," premiered by Koichi Hamanaka on Saturday. I
wonder if it was composed on either Finale or Sibelius software, or
something similar, since I see the same formula-driven (instead of
melody-driven) type of work all over the Sibelius.com composers' website.
Composition programs make cut-and- paste, inversion and retrograde way too
easy. Let's see, we take this arpeggio and turn it around backwards, then
flip it upside down, then upside down and backwards, then play the sequence
in reverse, then.... Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

>There are modern but TONAL composers and compositions
>out there and personally I'd like to hear a lot more of them.
>High, fast and squawky doesn't impress me at all. A modern
>work - but with some semblance of tonality like the Bela
>Kovacs Hommages does.

Did we sit next to each other when Edward Palanker performed the Kovacs
Hommage to Zoltan Kodaly on Wednesday? I'm getting muddled about whom I
met when. I liked that piece.

Lelia Loban
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban
Kerry and Edwards in 2004, because regime change begins at home!

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