 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2005-09-26 00:27
Someone asked me offlist if I could give an example of a 'cup of coffee' moment in the clarinet literature.
OK, the last beat of the seventh going into the eighth bar of the slow movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto.
This formula was written by Mozart and his contemporaries thousands of times. Yet you often hear it played 'musically', with a deeply meaningful slow shudder, as though it were something really special.
More contextual stuff about this movement:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/2000/07/000901.txt
Tony
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Author: bryris
Date: 2005-09-26 01:08
I don't know.....
Just sounds good to me. If you played bar 6 and then played bar 7 as a whole note it wouldn't sound right. To me this 'cup of coffee moment' just keeps the rhythm of the piece.
When you get into the subjective realm of music, everything becomes opinion. No matter how complex or simple one's endeavors into music are, as long as its gratifying, thats what its all about.
Its always interesting to hear someone else's viewpoint.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2005-09-26 01:31
bryris wrote:>> I don't know.....Just sounds good to me. If you played bar 6 and then played bar 7 as a whole note it wouldn't sound right. To me this 'cup of coffee moment' just keeps the rhythm of the piece.>>
Yes, like cups of coffee keep the rhythm of the day for some people. They're normal, you see.
Playing 'normally' doesn't mean doing nothing -- just like having a normal day doesn't mean you don't drink cups of coffee.
Mark Charette quoted Nadia Boulanger to effect in another thread. She said: "There can be no freedom without discipline".
Translate here as, "You cannot play expressively if you can't play normally."
Translate again: "You can't have something be alive expressively if you can't have it be alive normally."
Deduce:
You have to be able to understand, and express, 'normal' aliveness.
Too many performers can't, because they were taught that you have to put 'feeling' into everything you play.
Tony
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Author: steve s
Date: 2005-09-26 04:08
: Tony Pay (---.dsl.in-addr.zen.co.uk) said
Translate here as, "You cannot play expressively if you can't play normally."
Translate again: "You can't have something be alive expressively if you can't have it be alive normally."
Deduce:
You have to be able to understand, and express, 'normal' aliveness.
Too many performers can't, because they were taught that you have to put 'feeling' into everything you play.
This is interesting. What are we expressing? And what feelings are we putting into the music?
Let us take the case of Mozart. Do we know exactly what emotion or intellectual construct Mozart was trying to express by writing the concerto? Musicologists and historians may be able to give us a partial answer, but since Mozart is long dead, it is impossible to get a definitive answer. Is there sufficient information in the written music itself and the generations of written and aural performance practice tradition that we carefully study as part of the learning process? Obviously, there is not enough information here; if there were, all performances of this composition would sound identical, there would be an agreed-upon correct way to present it, complete with the correct expression of the emotion that Mozart intended.
So what are we trying to express? In my opinion, we are trying to communicate to the audience the emotions that the music evokes in ourselves. These emotions probably have nothing to do in detail with the emotions that Mozart felt during the Genesis of the work. And how we express this is completely a function of our unique, individual life experience.
this is where I have a problem with the word "normal". Normal varies widely from culture to culture, and within a supposedly homogenous culture, for example that expressed by Western classical music. I guess all you can do is play whom you are and try to be informed about the history and traditions of what you are playing. I am also unclear as to how the emotions one experiences can be labeled nornal, abnormal, true, false, forced, natural, etc.
Steve
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2005-09-26 04:14
The fact that we are so often obsessed with "what did the composer mean" is, I think, counterproductive to the expression of music. He wrote it. He died. Now we have notes on a page. I think he may very well have liked people to play it in completely different ways.
When I write, I do it with this mindset (which I'll probably include at the bottom of scores once I start to distribute them, perhaps with some grotesquely pretentious verbage): "Written on this stack of paper is a bunch of stuff that I think sounds pretty cool. However, I also think that it may very well sound cool an entirely different way, perhaps one I'd never thought of. I encourage you to try and look at it my way, because I think it sounds cool the way I've written it. Then, if you'd still like to play it a different way, have at it!"
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2005-09-26 09:14
steve s wrote:>> This is interesting. What are we expressing? And what feelings are we putting into the music?>>
Again, my point -- my only point, really -- is that we don't 'put feelings into' the music.
As Alex says, and as I've argued elsewhere, we find a music (note, 'a' music -- and meaning by 'music' something that is alive) that corresponds to a bunch of dead marks on a piece of paper. Sometimes that music will 'want to be' emotional, sometimes it will 'want to be' formal, all inevitably according to us. (Sometimes we may change our mind about what a particular bit wants -- it seemed to want that at first, but the piece lives better if we keep that till later. So things other than just what the music makes us feel when we hear it are involved.) What we know about the composer and his style may help us in the process of discovery, or not.
What we find is then true to itself, internally. It makes sense, because 'it' is alive.
>>...how we express this is completely a function of our unique, individual life experience.>>
So I'd say, partly a function of our unique, individual life experience, because the demand that a new piece makes on us may change us.
>>...this is where I have a problem with the word "normal".>>
By 'normal', I meant, normal in the context of the style that we're playing in.
You might get a better idea of how that works from a discussion of the Copland clarinet concerto at:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/1999/09/000786.txt
There I try to make clear that 'swing' -- which is 'normal' within the jazz style that embodies it -- becomes instead a 'feature' if it is applied to the Copland.
Tony
Post Edited (2005-09-26 09:25)
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Author: Markael
Date: 2005-09-26 10:59
"Found my way upstairs and drank a cup;
and looking up, I noticed I was late."
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2005-09-26 11:02
Markael wrote:
> "Found my way upstairs and drank a cup;
> and looking up, I noticed I was late."
Sounds like a day in my life ...
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Author: Mike Clarinet
Date: 2005-09-26 12:16
Is that 7th to 8th bar turn in the Mozart slow movement just a bit of decoration that shouldn't be taken too seriously? Are we in danger of trying to read something into the music that isn't really there in terms of emotion, feeling, life experience anything else? With Mozart, we are dealing with a classical composer, not a romantic one who is trying to create an emotional context. The Clarinet Concerto, as far as I know, was the first really significant concerto for clarinet. Love it or loathe it, it is still the benchmark by which all subsequent concertos are compared with. I do not mean to belittle any emotional content in Mozart's music (any of it) because much of it is extremely beautiful and moving. Surely the purpose of the clarinet concerto is to show off the clarinet's and clarinettist's capabilities, and very beautiful though the slow movement is, there is no hidden emotional agenda. That doesn't mean that we should play it just as a technical exercise, but that we should leave the listener marvelling at a full, rich tone and the fluidity of the scale passages and ready for the mayhem of the Rondo, not in tears.
That's what I think anyway.
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Author: Katrina
Date: 2005-09-26 16:01
I suspect much of the "emotional" content of many frequently-heard (as in film or tv) pieces of music comes from these (usually) fictional situations they accompany.
Like the Mozart quintet that Winchester attempts to teach the Korean musicians in the final episode of MASH.
So much Tchaikovsky seems to have obtained this hyper-wrought, dare I say OVER emotional sense as well.
Composers such as John Williams don't help either, with their usage of the style of different earlier composers to "heighten the mood" of a particular film.
And don't get me started on Andrew Lloyd Webber...
Katrina
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Author: jim S.
Date: 2005-09-26 16:10
Before we get too, too musicalogical about Mozart we should remember that he was simply a person, despite his genius, subject to impulse, (sexual and otherwise), and the standard human weaknesses and neuroses. He was very intolerant of convention for convention's sake and easily bored. He probably would be bored by this discussion. Perhaps, as he once did, he would jump up, do a leap over a table and meow.
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Author: larryb
Date: 2005-09-26 16:12
or stick his finger in his rear, smell it, and then write a letter to his father about it
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Author: Markael
Date: 2005-09-26 16:18
So which is worse--milking the emotion or analyzing the music to death?
Music can be many things to many people.
What I don't like is when a particular way of looking at or appreciating music seems forced onto the listener. For instance, Disney's original Fantasia movie has visual imagery that clashes with the way I appreciate the music.
On the other hand, we can credit Williams, Weber, et al for keeping good music alive and in the minds and ears of people.
Think about it. There are certain classical and early jazz pieces that many of us can't hear without thinking of farcical cartoon characters--over the Waves, Mendelssohn's Spring Song, The Barber of Seville, and any classic jazz piece with a running bass clarinet or bari sax line. You can curse the association or bless the fact that it has done more for music appreciation than most music classes.
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Author: Katrina
Date: 2005-09-26 18:01
"What I don't like is when a particular way of looking at or appreciating music seems forced onto the listener."
Markael,
That is exactly what my point was. Through cultural association, way too much music has become something I never heard in it in the first place. Strauss' "Also sprach." Tchaikovsky's "Romeo & Juliet." In fact, for ME all Tchaik has gone the way of becoming almost overbearing in the emotion it "tells" me to feel.
Therefore, I like "old" stuff...Josquin, Dufay, etc. At least just for listening. Playing's a whole 'nuther ball game!
Katrina
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Author: BobD
Date: 2005-09-27 13:25
But then the crux of the matter is that we don't really know if we exist or if we merely think we do. I must admit to returning to Hofstadter periodically in the belief that I may eventually come to understand him but I am always left feeling totally incompetetent. Nor do I underestand nor believe in The Big Bang. Thankfully music is something we don't have to understand to enjoy......as is that first cup of coffee in the morning.
Bob Draznik
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2005-09-27 20:31
Markael wrote: >> So which is worse -- milking the emotion or analyzing the music to death?>>
You don't want to do either. But you do want to see where the music is emotional, and where it isn't.
That's a matter of judgement.
Analysis -- I don't know. It may be useful.
But, what is required is that you understand that music need not be emotional all the time -- and then to ask, what if any emotion is the music asking here?
And, how does your answer fit in with the sense of the piece? Would the emotion be better represented elsewhere in the piece?
Tony
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Author: BlockEyeDan
Date: 2005-09-27 21:41
larryb wrote:
or stick his finger in his rear, smell it, and then write a letter to his father about it
I thought I was the only one who suffered through Mozart: A Childhood Chronicle. That was the highlight of an otherwise excruciatingly boring film
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2005-09-28 06:12
Katrina wrote:
I suspect much of the "emotional" content of many frequently-heard (as in film or tv) pieces of music comes from these (usually) fictional situations they accompany.
I did a postmodern presentation on Mahler 3 last year with a similar perspective, suggesting that Mahler 3 is actually a parody on Lord of the Rings and Beauty and the Beast, among others. In my personal universe, Beauty and the Beast came into existence ten years before Mahler's symphonies. Anyone under the age of thirty who doesn't get visions of dancing flatware while listening to the first movement is welcome to contradict this.
No matter how many times I listen to it, and no matter how many times I tell myself "Beauty and the Beast, that quotes from Mahler 3," I will always, deep down inside, think, "That Mahler used Beauty and the Beast in it."
"Thoughts of enchanted flatware dancing merrily in Barad-dur make it difficult for me to keep a straight face in this concert piece that is a blatant satire of well-known film scores" is an approximate quote from my presentation.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: larryb
Date: 2005-09-28 11:33
blockeyedan,
you may still be the only one who suffered through that boring film - I never heard of it - can you describe in some more?
One can also learn about Mozart's cup of coffee moment from reading his letters.
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Author: Markael
Date: 2005-09-28 12:07
Alex,
I knew the Beatles before Monk.
Every time I hear Blue Monk, I think "Fixing a hole, fixing a hole..."
I know, the music is quite different, but the cadence of the phrase just seems to fit.
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Author: BlockEyeDan
Date: 2005-09-28 22:07
Larryb:
"Mozart: A Childhood Chronicle" is a film that was made in the early 1970's. It was required viewing for the class I took on Mozart last fall (I wish all of my classes were that fun!). I'll get you the details when I see my professor (director, etc.). It is a black-and-white film that, you guessed it, chronicles Mozart's childhood. Only it does so EXCLUSIVELY through the letters he wrote. The characters DON'T SAY A WORD THE ENTIRE FILM! The narrator reads Mozart's letters as the 'actors' go through the motions.
Why boring? See ten minutes and you'll understand. The pace is excruciatingly slow. There was one scene where the camera showed a ceiling for literally a minute and a half. Other priceless shots included close-ups of Leopold sleeping in the stagecoach. For a minute and a half. People talk about various things bringing letters/books "to life." Compared to this film, the letters themselves burst with energy and wit. The reason I mentioned the film is that they portray that letter talking about how Mozart smelled something and realized that it was him. In the film, they show him smelling his finger, as the narrator reads the letter. Only the look on his face while he smells is akin to as if his dog had died. Honestly, this film is dreadful. I'd recommend watching it, because it's a textbook example of how to take a wonderful subject (Mozart's letters) and render it devoid of any life and humor whatsoever. Anybody who's ever read Mozart's letters should be able to appreciate how difficult this is to do; his letters are some of the funniest things that I've ever read.
Thanks all,
Dan
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Author: diz
Date: 2005-09-29 00:59
Speaking of coffee ... mental health warning to Aussies ... Gloria Jean's coffee is owned by ... Hill Song.
As to coffee moments ... there are so many of them, Mr. Pay, as to be almost mind boggling.
Without music, the world would be grey, very grey.
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