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Re: A small exercise

Author: beejay
Date: 2006-06-13 14:43

Quite by coincidence, I was rereading precisely that chapter in the Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet last night in order to elucidate some of the questions that came up in a recent thread about Mozart's music.
I suspect that our 18th century predecessors had a much greater range of articulation techniques than we do. Perhaps they didn't do flutter tonguing or circular breathing, but they had chest and throat as well as tongue articulation.
In the earlier thread, we noted the ambiguities in Mozart scores between dots and strokes. It is almost as is this ambiguity expresses a misty area between legato and staccato.
The machine-gun delivery of long passages of detached notes may impress at first but it quickly wears out its welcome. But how does one achieve the light articulation that was said to be typical of 18th-century Viennese playing?
I suspect the answer can be found in Tony's suggestion that notes should be grouped in the same way that syllables are grouped in speech. But this demands a very deep understanding, and not just technical, of the music, and unfortunately, we cannot all be musicologists.
bj

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