Klarinet Archive - Posting 000213.txt from 2010/08

From: Tony Pay <tony.p@-----.org>
Subj: Re: [kl] Cantabile
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:18:39 -0400

On 16 Aug 2010, at 22:17, Joseph Wakeling wrote:

> I was (am:-) working on a composition, and thinking about a term to emphasize to the
> players that they needed to approach the notes in terms of a creative,
> almost classical approach to phrasing, instead of the very literal "play
> exactly what's written" interpretation of notation that's typical of
> much 20th/21st century music. I was interested in writing something
> that had quite a sparse amount of dynamic and other explicit expressive
> indicators, but that left a lot of space for how the performer might
> choose to indicate or shape phrases.
>
> "Cantabile" seemed at first glance a natural choice -- that and
> "espressivo" seem to be two typical words in modern notation to indicate
> to the player "interpret this passage creatively/expressively rather
> than literally" or even "interpret this passage as if it was
> pre-20th-century music".

The difficulty with that sort of thing -- and I'm not sure you'll be pleased to hear this:-( -- is that I'd say that the best way to look at 'espressivo' is to think of it as being followed by a question mark, to be answered by the performer according to context.

So if I see 'espressivo' written by Brahms, say, I ask myself, "expressive of WHAT?"

Usually with Brahms, and other seriously good composers, you can come up with an answer to that question, sometimes judged by local criteria, but often also influenced by how you're dealing with the whole piece.

I said 'Brahms' because this morning, we were looking at the second movement of the second sonata. There, the first four bars can be played directly, and dramatically, using the strong, against the bar approach in the clarinet line. (The piano is of course strongly ON the barlines.) Then, bar 5, marked espressivo, can be thought of as a more ingratiating version of the material, with a more gentle, almost pleading upbeat. So in that piece, how you play bars 1-4 is significant for how you play bar 5. You can make it 'make sense'.

However, when I encounter 'espressivo' markings in the work of composers whose pieces don't make sense in the way that Brahms's do -- so that there is no real context from which to draw any conclusion -- I'm rather tempted to interpret it as a message from the composer saying something like, "Listen, I know this is shit; but, can you help me out a bit by making it sound more like something worthwhile?"

Whilst I'm sure that that's not the way YOU want to go, I have to say that I always complained about how, in the London Sinfonietta, some players used to use what I came to call, 'utility espressivo', as a sort of spray-on emotionality that didn't bear much relation to the actual music they were playing.

To me, it sounded false; and in a way, it was why I left the group and started playing other music.

Tony
--
Tony Pay
79 Southmoor Rd
Oxford OX2 6RE
tel/fax +44 1865 553339
mobile +44 7790 532980
tony.p@-----.org

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