Klarinet Archive - Posting 000225.txt from 2010/08

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Cantabile
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:27:15 -0400

On 08/17/2010 10:18 PM, Tony Pay wrote:
> 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?"

Well, this is kind of the crux of the problem I'm struggling with -- how
to get across to the players the _kind_ of expressiveness I want from
them, and how to give it context rather than making it simply a request
to do my job for me ... :-)

That was why "cantabile" seemed inherently a better choice than
"espressivo", because the former seems to me to carry a greater weight
of stylistic implication; and both are better than something like "ad
lib." or "freely", for the same reason; but _all_ of them carry exactly
the risk that a style will be layered on top of the music without really
paying attention to its own inherent character.

> 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'.

Mmm, yes. It's striking _how_ contextual that is -- compared to my
instinct for what a typical modern understanding/intent of "espressivo"
would be, which would be something akin to "Play it like wot youze playz
Brahms".

... whereas looking through the scores, Brahms himself uses the term
very sparingly, and it seems to be very closely associated with either
moments of particularly close rapport between the performers, or
transitions in the "feel" of the music.

> 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.

Yea, and it's exactly the situation I want to avoid -- I don't want some
kind of artificial expressive style layered on top of the piece like
icing, I want to provoke performer creativity in a way that there is a
close dialogue with the way the music is written and notated.

It doesn't help that I _don't_ always know exactly what I want in
precise terms of sound, but I _do_ find that I have a strong sense of
the expressive "weight" of notation -- it's difficult to explain very
well, but it's something along the lines of a feeling that "this way of
writing it is somehow more alive and will translate better into living
sound", and certain notations seem to be almost bursting with expressive
possibility.

One of the joys of contemporary music is the potential to create or
discover new interpretational styles or senses, the tragedy is it
doesn't happen so often :-(

In my last year at university in London I remember going to a workshop
at the Royal College of Music where a student ensemble was performing
improvisatory works by student composers. I was very keen to go along
because one of those composers was a young woman I'd met briefly at
another student concert at the Royal Academy -- she'd written a
wonderful, inventive cello piece for that occasion and I was keen to
hear her new work.

Most of the pieces at this workshop were fairly pastiche-y things with
notation mixed with spaces for players to improvise. Quite a few of
them were jokey -- one had a segment where the "improvisation" was for
each player to announce the name (and time) of the last person they
slept with. ("Princess Diana, last night" was the first answer. This
was in 2001...)

The composer I knew (who has gone on to become a very dear friend) had
taken a very different approach. Her piece was an almost entirely blank
sheet of A4 paper -- there were 3 small, short (1-2 bars) music systems
placed in different locations on the page, with tiny musical fragments
on them.

The individual fragments were brief but quirky -- the one that sticks in
mind is the one in the middle of the page, which was a two-staff system
with a big staff with a phrase marked "Nebenstimme", a tiny stave marked
"Hauptstimme".

The strong implication of the score was for an improvisation that would
be very sparse -- space and silence being touched by occasional delicate
moments of sound -- that would explore possibilities like trying to be
BIG and yet secondary, or tiny and yet dominant.

Anyway, the ensemble ignored all of that and just did the same old "all
play together and mess around with the musical gestures provided by the
composer" that they'd done with everyone else's music. My friend-to-be
was quite upset, partly because they hadn't even tried to achieve what
she had wanted, partly because she'd made an effort to give them an
opportunity to improvise in a way quite different from the norm and they
hadn't even appreciated that they _had_ that opportunity.

Someone made a comment to the extent that, well, it's par for the
course, it wasn't really the kind of environment where you could expect
that kind of sensitive, curious approach. But my feeling is ... well,
whyever NOT? How can you take a composer's work and be so lazy in
trying to understand it?
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