Klarinet Archive - Posting 000319.txt from 2005/02

From: George Kidder <gkidder@-----.org>
Subj: RE: [kl] composer's intentions
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:57:28 -0500

Dan and all,

While not strictly a case of "argumentum ad absurdum", this is an absurd
argument, and Dan (being a smart man) knows it. There is a difference
between musical (or artistic) absurdity and the changes that may be
necessary in order to have the bulk of the work preserved.

I suggest that if Dan's attitude were to have been applied in its pure form
throughout the time from Mozart's death to the present, we would have been
deprived of K622 entirely! Since there were no instruments which could
play it as Mozart envisioned it, it could not have been played, and would
not have been published. "Forger" would have had nothing to work with, and
neither would we. Only because someone tinkered with the music until it
could be played on an "ordinary" clarinet was the music published and
therefore preserved. Bad as the preservation may have been (and Dan is the
expert on this) it was better than no preservation at all.

The bottom line, for me, is the question: "Is it better to play something
with whatever instruments are available than not to play it at all?" For
me, the answer is clearly "Yes," with the cavies that it would (maybe) have
been better on the original instrument. (Maybe not - we know nothing about
Stadler's instruments - maybe they were terribly out of tune.) This does
NOT mean that we should not try to know what the composer intended, and
produce scores which are as accurate to those intentions as possible.

Dan's attitude would result in many fewer performances of any of Mozart's
music - one would need not only the proper basset clarinets (many of them,
perhaps) but a pianoforte (not a piano) tuned in the way it would have been
tuned in Mozart's time, period strings, etc., u. s. w.

And, finally, since there is a clear difference between a performance even
in a relatively small hall (Mozart's time) and a recording made in a large
hall and played back in your living room, we should have no recordings, either!

I'd rather have the music than the argument.

George
Bar Harbor

At 11:12 AM 2/22/2005, Dan Leeson wrote:
><snip>
>Are there no limitations to the arbitrary alteration of someone
>else's work? Can I draw a moustache on the Venus di Milo because
>it looks good to me? Why not? Da Vinci put moustaches on his
>paintings of men.
>

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