Klarinet Archive - Posting 000079.txt from 2009/12

From: "Dan Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Letting the players decide
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:17:32 -0500

In an edition I did for Bärenreiter, I had a basic problem in that a certain
passage could be executed in two different ways.

I had evidence that supported a particular way and that is the way I
submitted the manuscript to the publisher. I refused to even acknowledge the
"other" way. The editorial board felt that my suggested solution was too
radical, so they proposed that both solutions be presented in the edition,
which would give the players the opportunity to decide which way to play it.

At that point I went ballistic, saying, "The players have no way to resolve
this matter other than with basis of taste. Democratic rules don't apply
here, and taste is most frequently derived from the last 20 performances of
the work. No evidence is available to the players so that simply shoot from
the hip."

The editorial board hung in there, and so did I. Teeth were bared. Knives
were drawn. Canons were brought out. But in the final analysis, they are
paying for the edition and it will be done their way no matter what evidence
I present in support of my proposed solution.

In my most recent book, I addressed the "let the players decide" phenomenon
and I offer some of the text I wrote on that subject. It is slightly
modified to avoid giving away what the issue was.

"Very much against my better judgment, I reluctantly agreed to the
[editorial board's] proposal, and not a day goes by when I do not regret
that agreement because it was a serious mistake. I should have insisted that
only one interpretation be presented and fired my canon. However, that could
have provoked a serious and unnecessary conflict with the editorial board
from which no one would have benefited. My objection was not ego driven but
was based, instead, on the belief that the democratic process of allowing
the players to resolve the problem is unlikely to decide the question.

"Performers do not have the information needed for such decisions.
Furthermore, some of the players will have performed the work many times in
older editions, and this familiarity leads to resistance to the kind of
dramatic change that I suggested. Performers are often very much set against
dramatic alterations of works that they have played in a certain way and on
many occasions.

"One conductor, who recorded the work in New York with expert professional
players, many of whom who had been my colleagues, took a vote and the count
was not in favor of the solution that I proposed. The incident was reported
to me by the conductor himself and confirmed privately by one of the
performers. The entire episode took only a few minutes, and neither the
players nor the conductor were familiar with the issues involved. That is
not surprising; a rehearsal is not a debating society, a musicological
seminar, or a democratic forum, and complex technical issues are rarely
resolvable by democratic processes of majority vote.

"I do not know where the idea arose to leave the ultimate resolution of
certain complex musicological issues in the hands of the performers. To do
so is little more than editorial spinelessness. Such decisions -- and this
one was one of them -- are not performance issues, but rather
evidence-driven, objective, editorial decisions. Unfortunately, those
analyses sometimes require a complicated and Byzantine technical journey. So
the decision to leave the solution of the problem to the performers places a
burden on them for which they generally have neither the information from
which they might derive a rational decision, nor the time and circumstances
needed to make it."

END OF QUOTE

So in the case of the Copland concerto, the idea that the player's should
decide if the note is C or C-flat is unlikely to achieve the truth, and
we'll probably never know what that truth is.

Dan Leeson

First class curmudgeon

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