 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-08-22 14:45
I've thought of bringing this up a number of times, but I don't think I've actually done it (I don't see it in a search of the archives). Sometimes something comes to mind and you wonder if you said it out loud or only thought it to yourself. Apologies if this is a repeat topic.
Schumann indicates in the piano part triplet beam, stems down, for the bottom right hand voice, while the top (melody) notes, stems up, are beamed as duplet eighth-notes. The clarinet melody, when it follows the piano 2 bars later, is notated in duplet eighths.
The notation in the piano part has always made me wonder if Schumann may have meant a sort of notes inegales tradition here. At the least, it's always seemed awkward to me to have the piano play the melodic notes in triplet rhythm to coincide with the triplets in the same hand while the clarinet plays exactly the same material in straight duplets.
There is an 18th century tradition that I've read about (and that Leinsdorf writes in The Composer's Advocate continued as late as Schumann) of making the short notes of dotted melodic rhythms coincide with the last note of a triplet accompaniment figure instead of occurring later, as a literal reading would dictate. So there were conventional understandings of rhythmic notation in use well into the 19th century that were different from the literal understandings we tend to have (swing eighths in jazz being a well-known exception). Leinsdorf actually cites an example from Schumann's Novelette, Op. 21, that has notation similar to what he uses in the 2nd Fantasy Piece, except that in Op. 21, the melody note *is* a 16th note after a dotted eighth.
I have listened to a number of recordings, some by well known performers, both on YouTube and from my own collection, to try to get a consensus, and I find that the accompanists reach none at all - some play duple eighth notes, fudging them around the prevailing triplets and some play clearly triplet melody notes to coincide with the accompaniment figure. However, I've yet to find one recording, regardless of what the pianist does, in which the soloist imitates the triplets. As I've already said, it sounds to me a little bizarre to have the melody played two different ways, but I always find myself wondering if the intent was really to have the clarinet fit with the accompaniment, playing triplets (quarter-eighth in a beat) imitating the pianist.
Has this occurred to anyone else, or am I being too iconoclastic in questioning dozens of clarinetists (not to mention YoYo Ma, who recorded it with Emanuel Ax). Is there discussion about it published anywhere?
Karl
Post Edited (2013-08-22 15:35)
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Author: Simon Aldrich
Date: 2013-08-22 20:59
As it pertains to Classical and Romantic music, Karl's question touches on a very important notion; "Overwhelming historical evidence makes it clear that composers expected skilful performers to inflect the notation in ways that were governed by well-understood conventions and to employ a range of expressive practices that, although un-notated, were an essential part of their conception."
That is a quote from an important article by Clive Brown in a recent edition of Early Music, "Rediscovering the language of Classical and Romantic performance".
http://em.oxfordjournals.org/content/41/1/72.full
In discussing slavish adherence to the printed page and its consequence, the unwarranted veneration of Urtexts, Brown touches on Karl's very question at the end of the following quote, "An Urtext may well embody the composer’s intentions for the notation, but to make a naïve connection between this and the composer’s intentions for the performance is nonsensical. For Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Brahms, the notation carried many subliminal messages that have been obscured with the passage of time. Thus, for instance, slurred notes of equal length were not ‘intended’ by any of these composers to be performed scrupulously evenly, and long–short patterns such as dotted quaver–semiquaver were not ‘intended’ to be performed exactly as written, nor was the relationship between melody and accompaniment ‘intended’ to be confined in the straitjacket of the notated score."
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-08-23 04:35
Thank you, Simon. To begin with, here are some further extracts from Clive Brown's article, with comments by me. (I do have something to say about the Schumann too.)
Quote:
Throughout the Classical and Romantic periods, a more or less literal performance of the kind we generally hear today, observing all the note values, pitches, dynamics and tempo terms, was regarded merely as a stage on the road to mastery; the aim of every gifted musician was to understand and give life to the subliminal messages behind the notation. This is clearly conveyed by Hummel’s distinction in his 1828 Anweisung zum Piano-Forte-Spiel, and Spohr’s in his 1833 Violinschule, between ‘correct’ and ‘beautiful’ performance. Both authors attempted to explain the distinction, but confessed like many other authorities that it can only be properly understood through hearing performances by great musicians. With this I agree.
Quote:
Some established modern performers and teachers may like to ignore historical evidence on the grounds that we should cultivate a contemporary style of performing older repertory, having no obligation to perpetuate or re-create the practices of the past; yet they may simultaneously subscribe to the fallacious notion that by rendering a musical score with conscientious fidelity to the notated text and all its performance markings (as they understand them) they discharge the pious duty of fulfilling what is commonly referred to as ‘the composer’s intentions’. This is something of a straw man for me, because I find very few players to be pious in this way. The problem is rather the opposite: people ignore urtext and editions both.
On the other hand, there are very few really good players. It's difficult to find someone of whom one could honestly say, as CDF Schubart said of CPE Bach's playing, "One is conscious of witchcraft without noticing a single magical gesture."
Quote:
Changes of outlook and taste, leading to changes in performing style, occur gradually in music as they do in every area of life, but occasionally there are periods of more rapid and radical change. I believe we are on the verge of such a transformation. Working internationally with young musicians in conservatoires and with a number of professional ensembles to explore and experiment with the implications of historical evidence for Classical and Romantic performance has convinced me that there is a growing and ultimately irresistible urge to reassess our understanding of the practices that turned ‘correct’ into ‘beautiful’ performance. The trouble with this is the danger that we reify the notion of 'practices'. That's as in: they're the ACTIONS that turn 'correct' into 'beautiful'.
From what I know of Clive Brown: he wants performers to DO MORE OF THE THINGS THAT PERFORMERS OF THE TIME DID, and he's happy when they do.
That isn't where 'beautiful' performance comes from. Beautiful performance comes from a deep understanding and embodiment of the relational structures -- including, but not limited to, the emotional structures -- that lie behind the notation. That understanding reaches fruition in the embodiment of those structures in real time.
Of course, one must be INFORMED by what the notation signified to contemporary players; but one cannot go directly from the anecdotal evidence to the execution. Each attempt has to go via the other, mysterious, relational world of the musical imagination.
It has to come, in one metaphor, 'from our hearts' -- or as Taruskin puts it, from our spines.
This is not just a 'period performance' problem. It constitutes the distinction between excellent and superficial playing of ALL music.
I say that there is a 'performance-shaped' hole in all the academic literature on performance, because characterisation of the mystery of how a master musician can move us -- a characterisation of CPE Bach's 'witchcraft', if you will -- doesn't yield to the listing of 'magical gestures'. The historical evidence is there to be seriously investigated, and I spend much of my time underlining that; but I submit that scanty description of 'what THEY did' is out of place when it is made central to a superficial description of how we should ourselves approach a work.
I've tried elsewhere on this BBoard to describe how the situation may be approached:
http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=337846&t=337777&v=t
Clearly, the problem is insoluble in general; our work rather consists of providing interim solutions throughout our playing lives.Quote:
The weight of published evidence now makes it untenable to claim that the 20th-century concept of ‘fidelity to the composer’s intentions’ represents historical or musical truth in any meaningful sense. A healthy future for classical performance depends on bold investigation and implementation of the extempore practices that lie behind the notation. I don't much like 'bold investigation and implementation'. It sounds like a recipe for 'being different and therefore not boring like all previous performances', with all the razzmatazz that approach entails.
What we can do is work to integrate our understanding of period practices AND our own instinctive musical responses so that we always play each piece 'from the heart'. Our hearts (varying according to musical style) need time to develop -- and especially, to proliferate:-)
Tony
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Author: clarinetwife
Date: 2013-08-23 19:42
When I learned the piano part for this Fantasy Piece many years after learning the clarinet part I took the shared notehead to be more of a musical cue on how to sing those pinkie and fourth finger notes in the right hand rather than being a rhythmic issue. Now that I think of it, though, why indeed are the eighth notes beamed? Perhaps because this expresses the desired effect of that line of notes. I was amazed at the rolling, tumbling feel of that right hand once I got it up to tempo. It was flat-out fun.
I am interested to hear what Maestro Pay has to say on this.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-09-03 13:54
What I want to say about #2 is in the spirit of the article by Julian Hook, "How to Play Impossible Rhythms" that I cited above. As he writes, "the most appropriate performance strategy is seen to vary from one example to another."
For myself, in this case I think it's best to accord what Hook calls 'triplet priority' to the first two bars in the piano. That means that you don't try to have the duplets BE duplets; the bars sound as though they're in 6/8, though you bring out the melody.
Reasons:
(1) The piano part throughout the Fantasiestücke has running triplets, until the exciting coda of the last movement, when we get those wonderfully rattly semiquavers, especially rattly on a period piano. (The opening of the last movement too is in semiquavers -- but we hear that more as a single gesture, I submit.)
I sometimes think that a good subtitle for the Fantasiestücke would be: "Triplets":-) Notice how flexibly they're used: the opening melancholy of #1 is accompanied by FALLING triplets, the next hopeful bit by RISING triplets. And in the middle section of the last movement, how gruffly they're used on the offbeats in the piano RH to counterpoint the clarinet and piano LH melody. I like to have the pianist make that a specially noticeable feature.
So, removing the triplet feel by distorting the rhythm at the beginning of #2 interrupts that triplet unity.
[Edit: one need not distort the rhythm in the sense that the second triplet can be placed accurately, and the third conjoined with the duplet, omitting representation of the third of the triplets; but I find that it's very difficult to hear that as three against two. Rather, one hears it as a (triplet) 6/16 rhythm, which for me still disrupts the triplet feel; cf. example 3d/d' in Hook, and the discussion in his [1.4]. Contrariwise, when in a 'three against two' both third triplet and duplet are present -- either as different notes or played by different instruments -- there is no problem, and both triplets and duplets 'flow'.]
(2) I've written elsewhere about the different 'registers' of the three movements of the Schumann; see, for example:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/lookup.php/Klarinet/1999/05/001105.txt
...and I've described here how sometimes I've played a recital that underlines an analogy between these pieces and the Stravinsky Three Pieces.
In this reading of the situation the register inhabited by #2 is the 'narrative' register, in which you can switch moods rapidly -- talking in the first two bars, say, about the 'happy princess' and in the next three about her sister, 'the sad princess'.
And actually, the difference between the piano triplets and the clarinet duplets helps to establish that difference. We play 'sadder' duplets, leap upwards a ninth instead of a semitone to a diminished chord that then turns toward the minor for our repeated falling third, written G____ F# E. The piano then returns to the happy princess, as is permitted by the rules of narrative, and we repeat.
Of course, everything else has to match; the clarinet tone colour and legato must reflect sadness, and the lilting 6/8 of the piano happiness.
Schumann has a well-known predisposition toward mood-switches in his music.
(3) I don't want to claim that this is the ONLY way of playing this 'impossible rhythm'; I'm not cast in the mould of one Jonathan Cohler, who insists (not to me on this occasion) that duplet priority is forced. (See the companion thread on the Klarinet List:Quote:
As I said, there is absolutely no question that the double stemming that Schumann used with two stems up and three stems down means that the upper notes are to be played as duples and the lower as triple. So, for example, if the upper duple is on the first and third note of the triple, the rhythm of the three notes is actually like eight note, sixteenth note, dotted eighth.
That is unequivocally what Schumann meant by that notation. It doesn't matter who plays it one way or the other. That is what Schumann meant when he wrote it that way...
The upward stem notes are absolutely clearly duplets. No point in discussing it here, you need to analyze and look at the entire score, and his other scores, and how he uses the notation.
Signing off. ;-)
However, I have to say that I've never heard this passage, even in isolation, played successfully with duplet priority. [Edit: that's probably because of the bit I added above, about hearing a different rhythm rather than three against two with a missing triplet.]
Perhaps a master pianist with supreme touch might convince me, who knows? But the other reasons above for not doing so would still stand.
Tony
Post Edited (2013-09-03 18:10)
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Author: clarinetwife
Date: 2013-09-03 16:19
Tony Pay wrote: >And actually, the difference between the piano triplets and the clarinet duplets helps to establish that difference. We play 'sadder' duplets, leap upwards a ninth instead of a semitone to a diminished chord that then turns toward the minor for our repeated falling third, written G____ F# E. The piano then returns to the happy princess, as is permitted by the rules of narrative, and we repeat.<
That's the way I've always envisioned it.
As far as possible duplet priority goes, I wonder about the second eighth note in the upper voice being one with the third triplet in the lower voice rather than placing that note in the physical spot where it would be played as a true duple, eg: before the third triplet in the lower voice. In that case there would not be a double stemmed note.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-09-03 17:34
Tony Pay wrote:
>
> However, I have to say that I've never heard this passage, even
> in isolation, played successfully with duplet priority.
>
> Perhaps a master pianist with supreme touch might convince me,
> who knows?
Thanks for the contrasting (to Jonathan Kohler's) take on this passage, Tony. I guess this part of it begs the question - what do you mean by "successfully" in this context? Most of the time in recorded performances the triplets go by quickly and are being so heavily pedaled and underplayed to emphasize the melody that it's hard to hear them at all when the pianist plays duplets. Lots of pianists play it this way in recordings. I have to assume that their execution is *unsuccessful* in your view - you've surely heard some of them. The last time I heard a live performance (uninfluenced by the sonic degradation of recording or, worse, YouTube) was years ago before I really started to wonder about this question, so I don't remember how the pianists sounded. Do you base your assessment of their lack of success on the technical inaccuracy of their rhythm or their failure to project a convincing overall view of the piano-clarinet relationship to counter the one you've described?
Karl
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-09-03 18:06
Karl wrote:
>> Do you base your assessment of their lack of success on the technical inaccuracy of their rhythm or their failure to project a convincing overall view of the piano-clarinet relationship to counter the one you've described?>>
I tried to clarify what I wanted to say in an edit of my post that you probably didn't see yet.
The failure (to date) is to do with the difficulty of creating the illusion of triplet flow when the triplets are incomplete. You can obviously move the last triplet into duplet position without technical difficulty; it's just that it then almost unavoidably sounds lolloping on the triplet sixteenth level, which is what fails for me.
I don't find the different rhythms of the tune between piano and clarinet sufficiently upsetting to justify what I hear as unnatural pianistically in the first bars.
Indeed, in a way I celebrate that difference, as I pointed out.
Tony
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-09-04 03:50
I wrote:
>> The opening of the last movement too is in semiquavers -- but we hear that more as a single gesture, I submit.>>
I meant, of course, the first first-time bar (and the third second-time bar) are in semiquavers; the actual opening has triplets in the piano, duplets in the clarinet as usual.
Probably everyone has noticed that the last movement has echoes of the previous movements in it. That's totally explicit in bars 13-14, where the first movement melody reappears.
But there's a really lovely moment just before that in bars 10-11, where the texture and atmosphere of #2, if not the actual notes of #2, reappear. And, perhaps casting light on the previous discussion: here both triplet and real duplet versions of the melody co-exist, in piano RH and clarinet, with a delightful dissonance in the final duplets/triplets of bar 10, where the piano RH B and D 'sandwich' the C of the clarinet.
I always try to have the pianist begin clearly and then phrase away in both LH and RH, with no pedal, so that it sounds like a vocal trio (LH, RH and clarinet) when I similarly phrase away in melodic -- but not rhythmic! -- unison. Doing that has the added consequence that the reappearance of the LH octaves of the first movement in bars 13-14 is even more powerful by contrast.
It's almost my favourite bit of the entire piece!
Tony
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2013-09-04 13:50
Different interpretations of these passages sound musical to me, but what I like about Tony Pay's approach is that he's not trying to minimize the counter-intuitive content in Schumann's writing. The question of what modern people think a dead composer wanted always causes trouble, but when a thoroughly professional, extremely advanced pianist and composer such as Schumann does something that makes the best musicians puzzle and argue over it, then I think we have to assume he didn't do it by accident. He meant it. And the corollary is that he meant for the audience to *hear* it.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-09-04 21:06
Even if a pianist were able to play the "impossible" rhythms by keeping two incompatible beats going, it seems unlikely that even the most sophisticated audience would hear them as such. More likely, those who heard the feat at all would suppose that it was merely sloppy playing by the pianist.
Richard Taruskin spoke of conducting a renaissance motet that had one part in 7/4 and another in 13/4. He practiced for weeks to keep the two going in his head, walking down the street conducting 7/4 with one hand and 13/4 with the other. In the end, he brought it off, but I doubt that anyone but he understood what was happening.
Thus we return to Karl's practical question, "What does the pianist do here?"
At the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, the baroque flutist Chris Krueger and a class including a number of professional performers discussed a much simpler example, the opening adagio of Handel's Sonata in A minor http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/4/47/IMSLP275846-PMLP156035-handel_sonata_flauta_362.pdf.
The notation switches constantly between dotted eighth + sixteenth and triplets, including many places where where the solo and continuo parts disagree. Some people insisted that the two rhythms should be played exactly as written, but Chris said that everything should be triplets, and almost everybody agreed. We played the movement with strict as-written rhythm and again with all triplets, and it was clear (at least to me) that the first way sounded fussy/sloppy, and the second way was graceful and "right."
Whatever we begin with and however we investigate the true meaning of the music, we must in the end decide how to play the passage. While everyone must decide that individually, and remembering that Schumann often wrote 3-against-2 and 4-against-3 rhythms, I still thing that there's a presumption that notes stemmed together are played together.
There's always room for disagreement and experimentation from one performance to another. The fact that some great performers play it one way and other great performers play it in another means only that great music can be played in many ways.
Ken Shaw
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-09-04 23:09
Ken Shaw wrote:
> Even if a pianist were able to play the "impossible" rhythms by
> keeping two incompatible beats going, it seems unlikely that
> even the most sophisticated audience would hear them as such.
> More likely, those who heard the feat at all would suppose that
> it was merely sloppy playing by the pianist.
>
But, of course, it isn't hard to play the rhythm accurately with a duplet, assuming you only play the third note in the duplet's place and don't try to repeat it, which as I understand Tony is part of his objection - the triplet feel breaks down each time one of those double-stemmed notes has to be played. One problem, apart from Tony's objection to the disruption of the triplets, is that most of the time in recordings where the pianist plays duplets (see my earlier disclaimer about my lack of exposure to live performances of this, at least with non-student performers) you can't hear the overall rhythm of those beats clearly enough to know (at least to my ear) that the third triplet *is* missing - all you generally hear clearly are the two heavily emphasized melodic notes. Not generally the case when the pianist plays the melody as part of the triplet.
> Thus we return to Karl's practical question, "What does the
> pianist do here?"
>
Or as much "what does the clarinetist do here?" because my main interest was whether or not the two parts should be in agreement one way or the other. Tony is comfortable having them contrast as a reflection of his concept of the "registers" of each piece and the fast-shifting voices or moods that characterize the "narrative" register of the 2nd piece. I get this understanding, even if I have to admit I'm not completely convinced that it fully justifies playing the rhythms differently. Still, it seems sensible and may yet grow on me and influence whatever decision I make if I'm ever in a position to perform the piece.
> At the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, the baroque
> flutist Chris Krueger and a class including a number of
> professional performers discussed a much simpler example, the
> opening adagio of Handel's Sonata in A minor
> http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/4/47/IMSLP275846-PMLP156035-handel_sonata_flauta_362.pdf.
>
> The notation switches constantly between dotted eighth +
> sixteenth and triplets, including many places where where the
> solo and continuo parts disagree. Some people insisted that the
> two rhythms should be played exactly as written, but Chris said
> that everything should be triplets, and almost everybody
> agreed. We played the movement with strict as-written rhythm
> and again with all triplets, and it was clear (at least to me)
> that the first way sounded fussy/sloppy, and the second way was
> graceful and "right."
>
This is the tradition I meant in my reference to Leinsdorf's book, a tradition that Max Rudolf also categorically supported in a conversation I had with him a very long time ago during a rehearsal intermission. In fact, the question about the Schumann came back to my attention the other week indirectly as a result of playing Shubert's C Major, which, assuming Leinsdorf is right about how late into the 19th century the tradition was observed, exemplifies this well (in addition to a couple of Beethoven excerpts that as clarinetists we've all played). But, of course, the situation in the Schumann is different in that they aren't dotted notes against the triplets. The original impetus for my question was to find out if the notation Schumann used somehow came from a similar (but different) performance practice of the period. One thing I've gotten from the discussion that has followed is that, if there was one, it hasn't come down to modern researchers as has the other concerning dotted rhythms.
Thanks to all for an interesting discussion.
Karl
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Author: clarinetwife
Date: 2013-09-05 02:49
kdk wrote:
One problem, apart from Tony's objection to the
> disruption of the triplets, is that most of the time in
> recordings where the pianist plays duplets (see my earlier
> disclaimer about my lack of exposure to live performances of
> this, at least with non-student performers) you can't hear the
> overall rhythm of those beats clearly enough to know (at least
> to my ear) that the third triplet *is* missing - all you
> generally hear clearly are the two heavily emphasized melodic
> notes. Not generally the case when the pianist plays the melody
> as part of the triplet.
>
So it sounds like you don't tend to hear the melodic line as well in the latter case where you have heard the pianist "playing the melody as part of the triplet"? If so that's too bad, because if that isn't heard the interplay between the piano and the clarinet is less effective from the first two bars. To me, laying down that melody in the rolling context was my main goal in learning the piano part, taking advantage of the unique relationship of physicality/technic and sound that is particular to the instrument.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-09-05 03:15
No, the melody comes out quite clearly when played as part of the triplet - the notes can still be emphasized if necessary. I just meant the texture tends to be clearer when the triplet rhythm is maintained. Maybe a lot of pianists go heavier on the pedal to cover the break in the rhythm when they play duplets.
Karl
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