Klarinet Archive - Posting 000402.txt from 2010/11

From: Tony Pay <tony.p@-----.org>
Subj: Re: [kl] Sabine Meyer
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2010 10:09:43 -0500

On 25 Nov 2010, at 01:03, corvo di bassetto wrote, in part:

> ...they don't...articulate or phrase in a historically informed way. We live in an old world and need to cultivate a sense for history...some people on the list will be offended and maintain, the said "virtuosi" had so much "musicality" etc...[but] of what kind the alleged "musicality" is, I don't know.

Well, Danyel often expresses himself in a rather direct way.

But I have been reading Peter Hall's book, "Exposed by the Mask -- Form and Language in Drama", and there is a sense in which I want to say that Danyel's complaint has its counterpart in Hall's assertion that "..there is little attention paid to the form of Shakespeare's verse in academic circles...there is very little acceptance of a method of approaching Shakespeare's verse in the professional theatre either. Most Shakespearean productions are a symphony of mis-scansions and misemphases and seem unaware of the fact."

I would say that Danyel's dismissal of modern phrasing as 'appalling', 'incompetent' and 'in rotten taste' goes too far -- well, too far for some of it, at any rate:-) And although Sabine's movement puts me off too (she once said to me, rolling her eyes, "Oh, I know I move too much!") I find much of what she does musically nowadays to be very acceptable.

But much of my playing and teaching life is spent as advocate for a set of ideas about structure that can inform and illuminate classical music -- the idea that 'Normal' bars do not admit of the sorts of crescendos that are often applied to them, for example. Such structures paradoxically give freedom to power of thought and feeling in Mozart.

(It's important, by the way, to realise that an audience cannot usually articulate in detail what a performer is doing. They are aware of the result, but not of the machinery used to create it.)

So what Hall is saying to performers about meter in Shakespeare, and what I find myself wanting to say about metre in Mozart, is:

LISTEN! This stuff is more important than you think!

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

Every task involves constraint;
Solve it now without complaint.
There are magic links and chains
Forged to loose our rigid brains.
Structures, strictures, though they bind
Strangely liberate the mind.

James Falen

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