 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Bubalooy
Date: 2008-12-05 21:52
I have read in a number of posts, most recently in posts about the Brahms Sonata in f minor, discussion about the lengths of notes, rests, articulation and so forth. Strict adherence to what is written is and idea that many hold dear, and to the extent that we try to do what we believe the composer wanted, I agree. Of course, various composers may be more or less precise in the directions they put on the page. But, there is another problem. How do we know what the composer actually wrote? I have two editions of the Bach Partitas, for example, which are both marked "Urtext" and they are extremely different. Also, I have the Schumann "Fantasiestucke" (can I add umlauts here?) with the notation "heraugegeben v. H. Bading. So how much of the score I have is what Schumann wanted and how much of it is Henk Bading's ideas? I think it is unreasonable to assume that every player will examine the original manuscripts of the composer, and even if they do, problems with penmanship etc. may cause confusion.
I agree with something Tony Pay said in another post, as I recall he said that what was important was to make the performance work musically. To me, this means largely examining the score and making musical decisions based on what you observe. Your choices should be choices that you have made rather than just what a teacher has said is correct, or an attempt to duplicate your favorite recording. Also, there are an infinite number of variables which can occur in any performance. A player may do something they've never done before, for example, the pianist in a Sonata may play a passage slightly more detached or with a bit more ritard than they did in rehearsal. The other player must then instantly alter there performance to what is going on. Every performance in any genre is, to some extent, improvisation.
I see I've strayed somewhat from my original question, so I pose it again. When do you feel it is ok, or even recommendable to stray from what is on the printed page. I guess I would particularly like to see a response from Mr. Pay, as I value his opinion highly, but this is not a letter only to him. I'm know many of you have informed opinions on this topic, and I'm anxious to see them here.
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Author: chris moffatt
Date: 2008-12-06 13:08
in the second movement of K622, there are several octave jumps that always bothered me when I was learning the piece. It seemed to me to be out of character for Mozart who was a supremely musical composer. My then teacher (Ph.D in clarinet performance BTW) didn't agree and said we just play as written, at least until we are advanced enough to take a few liberties. Shortly afterward the Academy of Ancient Music under Hogwood, released a version of K622 for Basset clarinet minus all the octave jumps. It sounded much more musical and in character for Mozart. Turns out of course that the clarinet as we know it didn't exist when Mozart wrote the concerto - Stadler was a basset horn player. The modern clarinet dates from the early C19. The Basset clarinet has a greater range than the standard instrument and Hogwood was able to record the concerto rather more to what he (and I agree) felt was the original intent of the composer. The score had been altered by copyists and editors to make it playable on clarinet. My point is that we never know what the original score actually was given that editing took place and numerous errors had opportunity to creep in during copying and prep. for printing. Although I expect we have a better chance that the music of more modern composers has come to us with fewer corruptions.
I guess it's important that in an orchestral setting everybody agree on what the music is. In a chamber group setting I'd be surprised if a piece got played the same way every time for the reason you mention. So how important is it? Horowitz hated to practice and frequently in performance made mistakes and even left out notes.........doesn't seem to have hurt anything though, the sheer musicality of his performances completely overshadowed any "errors". Music is as much in the ear of the performer and listener as in the pen of the composer
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2008-12-06 13:18
I agree with Tony about always playing musically, that's what it's all about. My opinion is that you should try to follow the composers wishes as far as you can determine them but let's not forget the one thing that makes one performance different, for better or for worse, than another. It's called interpretation. ESP
www.peabody.jhu.edu/457 Listen to a little Mozart, live performance,
(my interpretation).
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Author: NorbertTheParrot
Date: 2008-12-06 13:29
Chris Moffatt wrote:
"Turns out of course that the clarinet as we know it didn't exist when Mozart wrote the concerto - Stadler was a basset horn player. The modern clarinet dates from the early C19. The Basset clarinet has a greater range than the standard instrument"
This is very misleading. It implies that the clarinets of Mozart's day invariably had a range down to written C3. This is not the case.
Facts:
1. The "modern" clarinet, if by that we mean the Boehm clarinet, dates from the middle of the C19.
2. However, the lower limit of the clarinet's range was fixed as written E3 long before the Mozart concerto was written. The word "clarinet" was used to describe an instrument, typically in Bb, A or C, with a range down to written E3. The term "basset horn" was used to describe an instrument pitched in G or F, with an extension down to written C3.
3. The instrument for which the concerto was written was called a "bass clarinet" in Mozart's time. It was pitched in A, with an extension down to written C3. It was a rarity, not the standard instrument used by most players.
4. The term "basset clarinet" is a modern coinage, the term "bass clarinet" having been appropriated for an instrument an octave lower.
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Author: rgames
Date: 2008-12-06 15:06
The notion of "the as-written page" as gospel is odd - I know a lot of composers and have never heard them make this claim. They're open to interpretation.
An easy way to understand this fact is to look at composers who perform their own works (including Mozart): they often do it differently in different performances, and sometimes stray very far from the "official" written score.
rgames
____________________________
Richard G. Ames
Composer - Arranger - Producer
www.rgamesmusic.com
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Author: davyd
Date: 2008-12-06 20:34
The composition of your audience probably makes a difference. If you're playing an audition, or a juried recital, it seems like you'd better play exactly as written and taught, or else. If you're playing for the public, it seems like you'd have a bit more individual freedom, depending on the context, and provided what you do doesn't cause problems for your colleagues.
When I play jazz solos, it sometimes seems that the more I deviate from what's on the page, the more my colleagues approve.
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2008-12-07 17:10
>>If you're playing an audition, or a juried recital, it seems like you'd better play exactly as written and taught, or else.>>
I was surprised to learn from a Korean-American friend, a high-level amateur pianist who used to play sonatas with my violin-playing husband, that even this apparently obvious fact isn't always true everywhere. She came close to deciding on a career as a classical pianist (but went to law school instead). Though she never entered the most famous international contests, she won or placed second in a number of Korean competitions.
When she mentioned placing second with a Liszt sonata, I told her I was impressed she could play it, because the piece has intervals of 12ths, I can't play them and her hands looked about the same size as mine. Indeed, she said, she can barely reach an octave. She told me she just played the outer or most prominent notes in the chords and moved other notes up an octave or down an octave as needed to preserve the harmony in the inner voices.
I asked what the judges thought about her altering what's in the score. She shrugged, grinned and said, "If they don't like it, they can jump in the lake." She added that her teacher taught her to move any notes she couldn't reach, that Korean competitions routinely assign pieces that require big intervals, and that judges there generally don't penalize students with small hands who can't reach everything in a chord as written, as long as they play the most prominent notes as written.
I hasten to add that I think "davyd" is quite right about playing things as written if we're talking about competitions in the USA.
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: John25
Date: 2008-12-07 18:22
Can I put a few words in from the "other side of the fence", as it were. I have edited and arranged around 30 works for various publishers, most of the works being clarinet pieces by minor composers.
In preparing the new version for printing you have either a very badly written manuscript or a very old, faded original printed edition. Both often contain notes which seem wrong (especially manuscript copies, where it is not always easy to decipher whether a note is on a line or in a space). Judging from the context, it is not impossible that one editor could decide on one note, and another could decide on a different one. Did the composer intend the passage to be different or is it just a repeat of an earlier passage? So you can get two different versions of the same work.
Older editions did not usually give any information, but modern ones (say over the last 15-20 years) do. From the editorial notes it should be possible for the player to reconstruct the exact notes and phrasing of the source document.
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Author: skygardener
Date: 2008-12-07 22:14
I have a question about this from the other side.
What if it is common practice to play *contrary* to what the score indicates and the only support for it is that "everyone plays it like that"?
Post Edited (2008-12-08 00:33)
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2008-12-07 23:58
I have an idea for those musicians that think we should all play a piece exactly how the composer wrote it, with no individual interpretation at all. So it gets performed just like it appears on the page, tempo, dynamics, articulation etc. Of course you would have to use the perfect publication too, if you could ever determine which one is. Put it on your computer with Finally or Encore, set it to sound like a clarinet, we can do that can't we, and the purest will get the perfect performance. No deviation what's so ever, perfect. You don't even have to find a good reed.
Of course there's a problem with Brahms or Mozart since there are no m.m. markings and in the case of Mozart, little if any articulations, we're not even sure which notes are actually what Mozart wrote, but you can make them up like some editors seemed to have done. How can anyone question you? Just say you studied the original and determined yours to be the correct version. As I said above, I agree with Tony that one should try to play what the composer indicated but please, a little bit of leeway for individual interpretation. ESP
PS, don't answer this please, it's meant to be a little tongue in check, or bad reed as the case may be. Just trying to get a little humor onto the BB. Some people need it.
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Author: chris moffatt
Date: 2008-12-08 00:48
just to spoil things a little for Ed P., i'm going to answer him anyway; his post put me in mind of the celebrated "Adagio" by "Albinoni".....should we play that exactly as written, to preserve the composer's intent? which composer? what intent? Ed you are right, we never can be sure what the Composer intended (the point of my original post), unless he/she is right there with us and we can discuss at length, or the composer is working with the band or orchestra towards a performance...then you maybe can get close to the original concept. My point is amply confirmed by John25 who has actual experience (boo hiss!!!). So we have to fall back to what makes musical sense to us. and yet seems to be, as far as anybody can tell, what the composer wrote. Who knows - editors and copyists may have saved us from a great amount of bad music......but then, maybe not!
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Author: Sylvain
Date: 2008-12-08 02:14
Ed wrote:
"one should try to play what the composer indicated but please, a little bit of leeway for individual interpretation."
This is in my opinion a dangerous statement, which has led to many poor presentations of music. The key words here are "leeway for individual interpretation". Ed, I am not going to tell you what you mean, because I don't know. But to me, interpreting a piece of music is not about "leeway" it is about how to best convey what the composer intended. A better word may be "communicate" with the audience ideas written by someone else.
So yes assuming that what is on the page is actually what the composer wrote, then that is what should be played.
I rarely hear the argument that one should change the pitch of a note in a piece, so why change everything else (articulation, dynamics, tempos, even duration) without remorse?
The computer program is not a good example, because doing exactly what is on the page is actually much harder than it first appears. There are so many different ways to interpret for example the word "crescendo".
Almost everything is about context, the historical and stylistic context in which the piece was written (which may even lead to IMPROVISATION, talk about individuality!). The dynamic, harmonic, rhythmic context of the note one is currently playing. The acoustic context in which one plays, the acoustic properties of the other instruments, not to mention the other humans and their own ideas one need to collaborate with while playing music.
One is faced with so many choices while interpreting a composer's work. I personally do not need "leeway", I need the exact opposite. I need directions, I need help narrowing down the choices I have to make when faced with the daunting task of interpreting a score.
--
Sylvain Bouix <sbouix@gmail.com>
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Author: mrn
Date: 2008-12-08 15:12
I come from the school of thought that tends to take the word "interpretation" literally. If we're talking about languages, for example, you hire an "interpreter" to tell you what someone's remarks to you in a foreign language mean in your own language (let's assume that language is English for purposes of discussion). Now, what they tell you in English involves some choices of words and sentence structure on their part, but at the same time they can't leave out any of the information from what was said in the original language--otherwise, they are summarizing, rather than interpreting.
The same thing, I think, applies to music. There is always room for some level of personal choice in musical performance--there are always choices we have to make in order to convey something the composer wrote (how short is a "staccato dot," how loud is mf, how dramatic to make a crescendo, etc.), yet if we leave something out that the composer wrote in or if we add something that really wasn't part of what the composer was trying to convey, we're no longer interpreting, we're paraphrasing.
I don't think it's so much the idea that "the score is gospel," as it is being true to the composer's intent. In studying scores, I have found there is usually a big picture idea or meaning behind the notation that you might very well miss if you don't take all the notational details into account. I think the key to interpretation is to try to find this meaning and then make your performance reflect what you find. As Ed's Finale/Sibelius example points out, a machine is not capable of discerning this kind of meaning--the computer may follow the details of notation exactly, but it never understands the meaning of anything it processes. Same thing goes for computerized language translation--90% of the time what you get from a machine translator (like Babelfish) is rather meaningless, and reading it is essentially an exercise in determining where the computer went wrong.
Although you will necessarily interject some of your own musical personality into anything you interpret, I consider that a necessary side effect of interpretation and not the goal of interpretation, per se.
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Author: Bubalooy
Date: 2008-12-08 20:19
I'd like to comment here again on this subject. Sylvain wrote, "I rarely here an argument that one should change the pitch of a note in a piece, so why change everything else..."
Largely, I agree. But, even in fairly well known pieces there are sometimes pitch errors in a piece of music. I have an edition of the "Kegelstatt - Trio" in which a rest has obviously been left out of the score. So yes, even notes have to be changed sometimes. With notes, or missing rests, it is often an obvious error, but with articulations, dynamics, etc. to some extent we have to trust the page, but can we? In a piece of Bach that has a crescendo in a keyboard part, when the Harpsichord can't crescendo, or, as I've seen, crescendos on a single note in some piano music. Did the composer really write that? Should we take articulations as Gospel, when we don't know for sure who wrote in the line to make the slur, or was it intended to show phrasing more than articulation. I fall into the play what the composer wrote camp. My question is, how do we know what he/she wrote?
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Author: Sylvain
Date: 2008-12-08 21:17
I think I misinterpreted your question.
I was talking about musical interpretation of an error-free score, you were asking about the possibilities of errors in a score and how much one can trust it. I certainly cannot comment on that in depth.
Your only answer is finding reliable sources (manuscript, first performance parts, first edition) comparing it with the edition you own and try to make sense of how the editor type faced the manuscript. The older the music the harder it is to do, which is why we still argue ad nauseum about which notes belong the Mozart "basset clarinet" concerto and which don't.
Given my limited musical knowledge I rely on the composers, music scholars and editors. I try to acquire "Urtext" editions, which will at least put a footnote when a note or marking is unclear from sources. Nevertheless, this is clearly also open for debate because citing the Wikipedia Oracle: "Plainly, the fidelity with which a printed edition can represent the composer's intentions must vary, and is never total. Moreover, the composer's intentions themselves are not completely well defined."
Nevertheless, in my mind the goal of Urtext is to give you information about what the composer intent is, thus allowing you have a conversation between composer and interpreter, with as few "middle" men as possible.
Although I own the edited Brahms sonatas by Harold Wright, they have only value in my eyes when put next to the Urtext. This way I can make *informed* decisions about my own choices.
So to your question: "how do we know what he/she wrote?"
The answer is "it depends". In Mozart concerto's case we don't really know. In pieces written by meticulous composer that are alive today you can actually *ask* them. For everything else in between, you need to either check all sources or place your trust in the hands of reputable editors and music scholars.
--
Sylvain Bouix <sbouix@gmail.com>
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2008-12-09 03:12
"leeway for individual interpretation"
When I stated that I didn't mean that leeway should be changing anything the composer wrote, I simply mean that a performance needs to be interpreted by the player. Do we really know excactly how Brahms or Mozart wanted something to sound. We can only "interpret" their intentions, that's all I meant.
One just has to listen to the great conductors perform the Beethoven Symphonies. The "interpretations" vary about as much as anyone can possibly imagine from one "great" conductor to another. There simply isn't one correct way to interpret any piece no matter how many, or few, directions are written in the music. That's the only point I've bee trying to make. I don't want to hear everyone play the same piece exactly the same way. On the other hand I don't want to hear it played so differently from what the composer intended either. ESP
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