Klarinet Archive - Posting 000456.txt from 2010/09

From: "Keith Bowen" <keith.bowen@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Improvising in Mozart's clarinet music
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:34:30 -0400

I have listened to Dan's advice on improvising and embellishments for years
- in fact he introduced me, and my Kammermusik Workshop, to the concept when
he gave us a masterclass on the Gran Partitta.

A couple of years ago, when I was doing a project for my MA Music, it
occurred to me that a good way to find out more about improvising was to
find out what performers were taught about it in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. So I ploughed through all the clarinet instruction
manuals I could find, in the British Library, about 20 of them, in English,
French and German.

Indeed there are some very informative things. Many of them devote many
pages to the trill (cf. Dan's remark on ending a trill). They show how the
common ornaments were played (for example, an appoggiatura followed by an
eight note should be played, as it normally is, as two sixteenth notes, BUT
the first should be emphasized - it was the way of doing an accent). And
there is the overriding instruction to learn from singers and they way they
ornament. NOT (and I think this is a common mistake) from keyboard manuals
such as CPE Bach and Turk, nor, for the classical period, from the JJ Quantz
flute manual. There's evidence that the guy was way out of date and hadn't
noticed that he was stuck in the Baroque whereas everyone else had gone
classical (:-)). So I dug out a well known singers' manual, by Martini,
around 1780, and found amazing examples of embellishments in singers'
practice. But this gives a clue - if you can sing it it is probably OK.

Interesting aside - I first found a facsimile of the Martini, and went to
the music librarian saying 'I suppose you're going to tell me I can't copy
it as it's a recent facsimile edition with editorial text'. He said 'Indeed
I am. But why don't you just use the original, we have it downstairs!'.

I will happily give anyone who is interested a link to download this project
report (and also my more extensive dissertation on the bass clarinet in A,
which is in the same location. Email me off list.

I would also recommend the book by Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic
Performing Practice 1750 - 1900 (Oxford, 1999).

Dan's other bit of advice was, 'Just do it 1000 times. You'll know when you
get one right. The next 1000 you'll get two right ....'

Keith

-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Wakeling [mailto:joseph.wakeling@-----.net]
Sent: 17 September 2010 13:01
To: klarinet@-----.com
Subject: Re: [kl] Improvising in Mozart's clarinet music

On 09/17/2010 09:39 AM, Diego Casadei wrote:
> Few years ago I heard Carbonare playing Mozart's concerto with a a
> basset clarinet under the direction of Abbado. The conductor insisted
> quite a lot on adding (moderate) variations whenever a phrase was
> repeated, and Carbonare did it. The biggest impact was indeed in the
> slow movement, in which repetitions are several (but the orchestra never
> added variations) and improvisations can take more time to develop.

I meant to write a note on that, because someone made a comment a few
threads back (tongue-in-cheek, I think) to the extent that one shouldn't
even be allowed to approach the Adagio until after one's first mid-life
crisis.

... whereas I think that for me, now, the Adagio is in many ways the
most playful and child-like parts of the concerto.

There's a big temptation, because it's called an Adagio, to try and take
it as slow as possible -- I thought of it like that, for a long, long
time, and was very resistant to attempts to persuade me to play it
faster, and I didn't like recordings where it _was_ played fast. And
when you do play it very, very slowly it becomes quite serious and
profound, and that in turn makes it quite difficult to add
improvisations because improvisation by its nature brings a chaotic
element that doesn't really go with that kind of serious profundity.

Anyway, a few years ago I was at a performance in London by Tony Pay,
conducted by Charles MacKerras, where the Adagio was taken far, far
faster than I'd anticipated -- in my memory at least, fast to the point
where it was possible to have some ambiguity between the bar having 3
beats or 1 beat. And _that_ suddenly changed things -- suddenly the
movement became very playful and full of little flashing sparks of life,
and in that context improvisation -- little joyful flowerings of
creativity -- makes perfect sense and adds to the result.

I don't really know what I thought of the movement as being "about"
before. I guess I would have said that -- taken very slow -- it has
something of a character of deep longing and also a kind of nobility and
grandeur, the wise old king thinking back on his life or something like
that. (These days I don't think wise old kings really exist. Any king
with any real measure of power, however kind they appear in person,
usually has some nasty little bastard with a torture chamber somewhere
underneath them busy tormenting and terrifying people in order to _keep_
that power.)

_Now_ an image I have in mind is of a parent playing with a little
child, taking joy and wonder in their every little gesture, full of
amazement as they watch the baby discovering new experiences and
learning -- as babies do -- things which as adults we forget that we
ever even _needed_ to learn, and amazed by their own capacity to spark
amazement and fascination and activity in this little creature with even
the simplest gesture ... and maybe the ending is the end of a "perfect"
such day, watching the baby go off to sleep peacefully with all the
day's new discoveries still swimming around inside his head.

It's still profound, but in a very different way, that's full of play
and creativity.
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