Klarinet Archive - Posting 000252.txt from 2005/01

From: Tony Pay <tony.p@-----.org>
Subj: Re: [kl] Rhapsody in Blue Gliss
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 13:15:39 -0500

On 13 Jan, "Bryan Crumpler" <crumpletox@-----.com> wrote:

> Had a recent disagreement about how to play the gliss in the opening of
> Rhapsody in Blue and I wanted to gather some outside opinions. I don't want
> to get into the whole original intentions of Gershwin with the "scale" or
> anything. I've already read plenty of literature on the subject and
> understand how the scale morphed into a gliss... but I just want to ask if
> people 1) play chromatically up until the D (4th line in the staff) and
> then gliss OR 2) start the gliss immediately after the low G trill? Seems
> to me, people would do the first as a matter of technical ease, but why not
> do it the second way if you can feasibly gliss the entire range of the
> horn?

I think the most important thing to say is that it's very difficult to
discuss this question without hearing you do it. It's possible that I might
for various reasons not like the effect produced by your total glissando, and
so prefer you to do it the other way -- though of course, I do understand
that I might think exactly the contrary.

Some of those various reasons might have to do with how in detail you made
the trill blend into the glissando, as well as the sound quality in the low
register. After all, an attractive aspect of what we could call the
'half-glissando' might be held to be that the trill and the subsequent run
don't particularly have a jazz flavour; but then half way up they magically
turn into something -- the smear -- which *does* have a jazz flavour; added
to which the sound produced during the upper register smear is different from
the standard clarinet sound. I might feel that the 'total glissando'
solution spoiled that transition effect, and that the loss of it wasn't
sufficiently compensated for.

Of course, a large part of the transition effect of any half-glissando lies
in how the transition from run to glissando is managed -- I take it that
anyone who has played it, or practised it, recognises that this 'comes off'
sometimes better than it does at other times.

In a later post, you said that your current teacher says that a total
glissando is 'wrong'. Now, musical things can only be right or wrong
relative to a context -- the aspect of the music that you're trying to
represent -- which can be referenced, even if not totally captured, by the
sort of argument I presented above.

What was your teacher's argument, if any? (Did he, for example, feel that
the low register glissando had a tonal quality that put it out of
consideration as a solution, even if it was recognisably a glissando?)

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd tony.p@-----.org
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE http://classicalplus.gmn.com/artists
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