Klarinet Archive - Posting 000072.txt from 2007/10

From: "Daniel Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Re: the effect of technology
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:58:21 -0400

About five years ago, I attended a meeting of the Mozart Society of America,
and there was a two hour session in which all the attendees had to dance the
minuet. The session took place on a basketball court floor because you need
a lot of room for many coples - the women in bulky dresses -- to dance the
minuet. It was a complicated dance that leaned heavily on hand and body
gestures which went this way at first and that way on the repeats. The men's
movements were generally more agressive than the women's, and this was a
strong societal influence.

The foot movements were not nearly as important as the body movements,
particularly those of the hand and arm. There were two instructors who came
up from Los Angeles where they worked in the movie industry making sure that
dances contained historically accurate depictions.

However, most of the Mozart orchestral minuets were not intended for
dancing. The minuet had become shape-shifted from the French court of Louis
XIV and XV, to the orchestral use with the only thing remaining being the
triple meter. And by late Mozart, the minuet had almost become the scherzo.

We did not go into the relationship of trios in the minuet to the minuet
itself. Two hours were not enough.

Having read some of the postings thus far (several of which gave opinions
about the lack of necessity to make repeats), this is often what happens
when one society applies its mores to a previous society; i.e., since we see
so few repeats in contemporary music of today, we do not see any necessity
to observer repeats in music of two centuries earlier.

I think that such views demonstrate our general ignorance of history and our
intolerance of things that depart from our own view of society. Once a
member of this list -- a young woman of late teen age -- said point blank
that she was a modern woman and refused to accept playing strictures that
applied to previous generations. Strong words.

Dan Leeson
dnleeson@-----.net
SKYPE: dnleeson

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Sausville [mailto:sausvill@-----.net]
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 9:17 AM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: Re: [kl] Re: the effect of technology

Er, folks, maybe you should ask someone who knows how to dance an minuet
whether the repeats are required in the dance.

M.

Keith Bowen wrote:
> David, I don't agree with this at all! And guesses are not evidence.
>
> 1. We know that Mozart was careful about whether or not to have repeats,
> since he marked "senza replice" when he didn't want them.
>
> 2. In traditional sonata form there are two reasons for repeating the
> exposition. One is to establish the first and second subject firmly in the
> mind of the audience before the development section - recall that with no
> CDs and emphasis on new music, for many in the 18th/19th century, this
would
> be the only time they hear the piece. The second is because the
introduction
> and first subject sounds different in the two cases: in the first you hear
> it in the tonic with nothing before, on the second occasion you hear it
> following the dominant ending of the exposition.
>
> 3. In the movements with most repeats, minuets/trios, the balance of the
> movements is wrong if we don't do repeats. David Whitwell explained this
> nicely; if you are listening to the trio, you lose the sense of contrast
> with the minuet if you've only heard it once, because it was a long time
> ago; if you hear it twice, you appreciate the trio all the more. Then to
> balance the key structure you need the minuet again. In many cases
> originally you would hear that twice also. BUT it should not be played the
> same each time. It is a chance for the first instrument players to show of
> their embellishments and interact with each other. When composers wanted
to
> discourage this practice, they stopped writing nearly so many repeats.
>
> 4. Sometimes they were added to increase the length, no doubt. But again
> recall that these were not CDs with which everyone was familiar, but new
and
> often revolutionary music. No harm in hearing it twice.
>
> Keith Bowen
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: klarinet-return-91902-bowenk=compuserve.com@-----.org
> [mailto:klarinet-return-91902-bowenk=compuserve.com@-----.org] On
Behalf
> Of David Lamb
> Sent: 08 October 2007 04:26
> To: klarinet@-----.org
> Subject: Re: [kl] Re: the effect of technology
>
>
>
> Dan Leeson on repeats:
>
>
>> That is very consistent with a cellist I played with many years ago. He
>> was
>> quite aged at the time, and had even played with Brahms himself. I asked
>> him about repeats and his response was the same as your statement; i.e.,
>> they never took any repeats, though he was speaking about chamber music
>> rather than large scale orchestral works.
>>
>>
> This is what I have suspected all along. In most cases, repeats add
nothing
>
> to the structure of a work, and they are there simply because they are
> there. My guess is that composers put in the repeat marks because they
were
>
> expected -- musical punctuation marks in a sense -- and I also guess that
> repeats were often not observed. I believe that they add little to an
> understanding of a piece, and I would be happy to do without them. I
> further believe that if composers felt a need to review the material, they
> should present it again in a different way -- a way that shows some new
> aspect or way of thinking. In general, a repeat is the mark of a lazy
> composer.
>
> David Lamb in Seattle
>
>
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