Klarinet Archive - Posting 000460.txt from 2005/08

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Low Eb in Brahms Symphony
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 16:33:52 -0400

I would like to suggest that your interpretation of what Brahms
did and the reasons behind his action are not useful. True they
are a scenario that explains the situation, but it presumes that
you know something about Brahms' state of mind, his intentions,
and his instrumental knowledge. Your statement that "... the
most likely explanation for the low E-flat in a C clarinet part
is that he intended the part to be played on [a] B-flat, but
wrote out the movement as if the clarinet were in C to make it
simpler to hear the music in his head..." is a particularly
onorous one because it effectively says that Brahms was an
instrumentational ignoramus.

Dp you really believe that he did this thing to make "it simpler
to hear the music in his head or play it on piano without the
mental hazard of keeping the transpositions straight"? In other
words Brahms was so stupid instrumentationally, that he wrote
parts out in C to avoid the labor of transposing in his head.

Quell chutzpah!!

Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net

-----Original Message-----
From: Shaw, Kenneth R. [mailto:krshaw@-----.com]
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 1:21 PM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: [kl] Low Eb in Brahms Symphony

We can take it as given that Brahms knew the range of the
clarinet,
though, of course, even Brahms nods. It seems to me that the
most
likely explanation for the low Eb in a C clarinet part is that he
intended the part to be played on Bb, but wrote out the movement
as if
the clarinet were in C, to make it simpler to hear the music in
his head
or play it on piano without the mental hazard of keeping the
transpositions straight.

If that's what happened, then the copyist who extracted the
individual
parts from the full manuscript score may have copied it as
written,
without transposing, and labeled it for C clarinet.

The only way to find out is to examine the manuscript. If
Brahms, in
the other movements, wrote the clarinet lines a step higher, for
the Bb
instrument, that would be good evidence that he when he wrote at
C
pitch, he wanted the C clarinet. If he wrote all the lines in C,
that
would be good evidence that the copyist forgot to transpose it.

For more on out-of-range notes and copyist's errors, see:

<http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/2001/09/000901.txt>
<http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/1997/06/000084.txt>
<http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=171319&
t=17130
0>

Ken Shaw

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