Klarinet Archive - Posting 000468.txt from 2010/11

From: Tony Pay <tony.p@-----.org>
Subj: [kl] Hall's "Exposed by the Mask"; scansion, metre, performance
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 12:16:02 -0500

Though the idea of not 'messing about' with texts is something that comes into the discussion in Peter Hall's "Exposed by the Mask", that was not primarily what I was appreciating in it.

Hall is concerned with how actors 'speak' Shakespeare's verse; this has resonances with me because I am concerned with how performers 'speak' classical music. I have become more and more aware of that concern in my own performance, and I see how it needs support in the musical world in general -- as does Hall see how his concerns need support in the world of Shakespeare.

It's why I'm dismissive of interpretative editions of the Mozart concerto, because they are forced to use the language of crescendo and diminuendo in order to produce any sort of editorial emendation, and that language is wholly inappropriate to the style, which relies on the modulation of underlying, unwritten norms. It's also why I'm dismissive of Keith Koons's article comparing various editions, the sole effect of which is to lend undeserved credibility to those editions, and why Etheridge's descriptive book about how various 'legendary' players have performed the piece is irrelevant to any serious musician.

The background to Shakespeare's verse is the structure of iambic pentameter. The background to Mozart's music is the structure of the bar and the structure of the phrase, and their interaction.

Hall says:

"Shakespeare inherited the iambic pentameter as something naturally English and, by emulation and imitation, he was clearly appropriating Marlowe's mighty line, lyrical and bombastic by turn. But he transformed it, made out of it something infinitely flexible and infinitely varied. Yet the form which stands in contrast to this freedom is always there. That is its NORM [my capitals]:

De-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM.

"...By the time Shakespeare is in his maturity -- the time of the great tragedies and even more, by the late plays -- he has a freedom in verse which is perfectly miraculous. Leontes' twisted passion and paranoia is accurately expressed by his clotted, irregular rhythms and mis-accents. But these irregularities only make emotional sense and can only affect and audience if the actor knows the underlying regularity beneath them...he must not give up forcing the line to scan: that tension is an expression of his passion.

"...It is always a shock to remember that Shakespeare's verse is his leanest and quickest means of communication. His verse does not represent "poetics". It is not poetry; for him it is the equivalent of ordinary speech. Artificiality is expressed by the prose -- it is always more formal, antithetical and ornate...[prose] is never natural speech: it is artificial. Natural speech is portrayed by the verse -- economical, fleet, often using the simplest of words so that the images when they occur may by contrast burn more brightly."

This relationship of the expressive to the Normal is precisely what I maintain is the source of the power of Mozart's music when it is well-realised.

Bar hierarchy and phrase structure are things we need to understand in our playing, just as an actor needs to understand the scansion. That's because they aren't there at all unless we decide to have them there. And both of them, bar hierarchy and phrase structure, are about how things BEGIN.

So here's how that works out in music: how much we decide to represent bar and phrase can be an important vehicle both of expressive and of what I've called Normal playing. And if in Normal playing the bars are merely being 'noticed' by the player as the music ticks along in an everyday way, then different characters are still available as a result of how precisely the 'noticing' is done.

Even everyday days aren't all alike.

It's important to realise that a stylistic structure is ALWAYS PRESENT somehow, even if it isn't being expressed. The structure of the barline, which gives an importance of some sort to the first beat of a bar, sometimes defers to a phrase and therefore isn't on that occasion expressed; and very often, even if it IS being expressed, it needs to be only slightly in evidence -- sometimes hardly at all. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between playing in which barline structure is implicit, and playing in which barline structure is IGNORED.

That contrasts with the fact that there are other musical structures that we don't need to show so much, because they are there in the music already. One that applies to a single line is TESSITURA (how the line moves between higher and lower notes); one that applies more generally is HARMONY.

A common romantic attitude to tessitura is to say, along with Casals, that as a melody rises in pitch, it should get louder; and as it descends in pitch, it should get quieter. Players of romantic tendency can easily think that this holds in classical music too.

But in classical music it's usually quite wrong. For example, as a scale rises through a bar, it Normally lightens at the end to allow the beginning of the next bar to be shown. And in fact, classical composers quite often write high notes towards the ends of bars to ensure that they are heard in what is stylistically a weak metrical position, and towards the ends of phrases to ensure that they are heard in what is stylistically a weak rhythmic position. Playing these high notes louder, and especially crescendoing to them, interferes with the metre and/or the rhythm.

With regard to the other structure, harmony: a player who harbours romantic tendencies will commonly make an instinctive movement towards harmonic tension. This often generates an unwanted local crescendo, contra the style. If a player particularly wishes to underline a harmony, it's usually best to do so following the model of an appoggiatura, rather than the model of a crescendo. You could say that the difference between the two ways of playing music, romantic and classical, is that the romantic way is always LOOKING FOR points of harmonic tension; whereas the classical way COMES UPON, SHOWS and then if necessary RESOLVES points of harmonic tension. This is of course what appoggiaturas do.

Avoiding doing too much with tessitura and harmony leaves affect or emotion to be shown by the modulation of beginnings and by phrase-shapes -- as in speech.

Hall says, after analysing some passages of Shakespeare's verse, "This text discipline, combined with a sense of the spoken word and an understanding of the acted word, is something that is always needed as part of the reading of Shakespeare."

I would say that the discipline of being aware of bar-structure and phrase-structure is always needed as part of the reading of Mozart and other classical composers.

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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