 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: GBK
Date: 2008-06-06 18:52
After having my advanced students learn many of the standard concerti and sonatas, I always leave the Mozart Concerto as their final repertoire piece before high school graduation and college begins.
As we all know, no two performances or interpretations of K622 are the same. Thus, the question always arises as to the articulation choices in many of the runs.
When teaching the Mozart Concerto, do you give your students the articulations you prefer, let them make articulation choices with your guidance, or have them listen to multiple performances and make their owns choices, whether you agree or not?
Possibly a combination of all of the above?
Or give them the Marcellus recording and say "copy that" ![[wink]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie3.gif)
...GBK
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Author: Sylvain
Date: 2008-06-06 19:43
I never taught, but I can tell you how it was taught to me by Bob Crowley who thought very highly of the Marcellus recording. His own version was a combination of Marcellus and Hasty's ideas with a few of his own personal tweaks.
He put in phrasings and articulations that he made clear he wanted to hear. For example, he was very specific with the opening of the 3rd movement, when to tongue, clip, lift etc. He was also always happy to hear what I had come up with on my own and would typically have two answers:
1- That's fine, but also try this other way and decide for yourself
2- When you are out of this room you can do whatever you want, but here is the articulation/phrasing you are going to play during the lesson.
I enjoyed the fact that I had to come up with my own version of it first that he then touched up based on his preferences and what he deemed stylistically (in)correct.
--
Sylvain Bouix <sbouix@gmail.com>
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Author: Philcoman
Date: 2008-06-06 20:24
My teacher indicated certain "traditional" articulations and also indicated her own preferences for various parts. Once I had tackled those (sometimes against my own urge to interpret) she allowed me more freedom. I realized later that she was schooling me in useful skills and performance staples for which I became grateful as time went on. And I have to say my own interpretation was more informed and cohesive afterward.
"If you want to do something, you do it, and handle the obstacles as they come." --Benny Goodman
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Author: Ryder
Date: 2008-06-06 20:30
I was taught to play the articultions consistent throughout the piece. The publication i play from is by Southern Music Company. None of the slurred runs were consistent in tounging. Mostly though, I tried to use David Shifrin's recording as a guide, much like I tend to do with the Weber pieces. I love David Shifrin's expression. His sound is so relaxed, yet so, well for lack of a better term, excellent to me.
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Author: GBK
Date: 2008-06-06 21:01
Ryder wrote:
> The publication i play from is by Southern Music Company.
Which one? The Tournerie edition or the Sloane/Wright edition?
> I love
> David Shifrin's expression. His sound is so relaxed, yet so,
> well for lack of a better term, excellent to me.
In the original question, expression and tone are a completely separate entity from articulation choices.
...GBK
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Author: mrn
Date: 2008-06-06 21:04
If memory serves, my teacher took basically the same role as Sylvain's teacher. She had some preferences for certain passages, but I don't recall her making suggestions for the whole piece (although maybe she didn't have to, because I already played it the way she thought it ought to be played--having a good reference recording helps. My current personal favorite is Sabine Meyer's, although since she tends to improvise here and there, I could understand not wanting to use it as a reference recording for students.)
Incidentally, I had the Southern Music edition (edited by Tournerie) at the time. It was full of inconsistencies.
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2008-06-07 00:14
Good question. I’m sure you will get many different opinions. I make several suggestions if I don’t think the student is sounding good with the articulations they are using. I try to encourage them to listen to several recordings and pick and choose what they like and then add or suggest some on my own. I always, I repeat, always give them a reason for what I suggest and let them know that it’s their final choice. There is no right or wrong articulation for the Mozart, though some may sound pretty bizarre. So my final answer is “all the above”.
One of my teachers, Eric Simon, who has a printed edition pub. by Shirmers, told me when we worked on it in high school that if you have a good clear tongue you can articulate more and if you don’t you should slur more. The most important thing is to make it sound smooth. ESP, www.peabody.jhu.edu/457 (listen to my Mozart)
ESP eddiesclarinet.com
Post Edited (2008-06-08 00:15)
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Author: Katrina
Date: 2008-06-07 00:30
I've always given them the articulations given to me by my teacher. Since I don't perform lots of classical anymore I've gotten lazy about notating what happens in different performances. I tell them that those are what my teacher gave me and have them listen to recordings, but none has challenged those articulations. They're just happy not to have to tongue everything like the urtext-type editions!
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Author: GBK
Date: 2008-06-07 00:59
Ef Palanker wrote:
> One of my teachers, Eric Simon, who has a printed edition
> pub. by Shirmers, told me when we worked on it in high school
> that if you have a good clear tongue you can articulate more
> and if you don’t you should slur more. The most important thing
> is to make it sound smooth
Agreed.
I'm not a fan of the numerous recordings where all that you hear is "machine gun" rapid fire tonguing on almost every run.
It seems, in my opinion, just an excuse to show that they CAN do it.
(or perhaps I'm jealous because I CAN'T )
I have enjoyed performances where almost all runs were slurred, and I've also enjoyed performances where tonguing and slurring were equally used.
...GBK
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Author: DavidBlumberg
Date: 2008-06-07 01:12
Though I do enjoy Tony Pays recording which is almost superhuman.
Haven't heard anyone else come close to tonguing that much, yet it doesn't sound like he's trying to prove anything. Artistic, appropriate, and impossible sounding....
http://www.SkypeClarinetLessons.com
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Author: kev182
Date: 2008-06-07 07:36
My teacher would pencil in his acquired articulations but would also challenge us to be creative... As long as it made musical sense and was consistent.
There is a VERY definite lack of creative interpretations I feel.
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Author: Ryder
Date: 2008-06-07 15:59
GBK
It's the Tournerie edition.
I know I talked about tone and expression, but I followed most his articulations also. Made more sense to me.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2008-06-07 21:19
David Blumberg wrote some generous words about my K622 recording. I'd like to take the opportunity say something about that performance, which has been criticised several times, here and elsewhere, for being 'over-articulated'.
First of all, I nowadays play many more passages legato. (It's over 20 years old, remember.) So I must have come to agree that a greater variety of articulation is preferable.
I should say that an aspect of the situation that's not often realised is that in many ways, it's much easier on a period instrument to produce flowing articulated passagework than it is to produce flowing legato passagework. Cross-fingerings and other acoustical unevennesses mean that adjacent notes can have very different responses, and the separation produced by articulation gives you the split-second that allows you to correct that.
So I suppose that as I've got better on the instrument, I'm able to play more of it legato:-) On the other hand, Mozart's own Klavier playing was described as being particularly detached, so that might seem to justify erring on the side of over- rather than under-articulation in his music.
Of course, the absence of slurs in many passages of both first edition and the Winterthur fragment, as well as in many other Mozart autographs, doesn't necessarily mean that Mozart wanted those passages played staccato. The scores of the period were intended to be read against the background of a well-understood performance convention, according to which players would quite naturally have produced an articulation appropriate to their understanding of the musical gesture. Where Mozart felt he needed to be explicit, he wrote a slur; but where he could trust the performer, or where the precise details didn't matter to him, he didn't. This sort of notation is sometimes called 'descriptive', or 'thin' notation; in contrast to, say, the notation of a composer like Webern, which is called 'prescriptive' or 'thick' notation.
The important thing, in my view, is to encourage students to try to find an articulation 'appropriate to the musical gesture', as I put it above. And that, of course, demands that we have some notion of what classical musical gestures ARE, as well as some experience of putting them into practice.
A particularly important feature of 'thin' notation is that it leaves classical stylistic structures (things like appoggiaturas, bar hierarchy, phrase shape and so on) open to be applied to VARYING DEGREES. So two different interpretations of a passage -- say, one that sees it as dramatic and another that sees it as more lyrical -- may be best served by two different articulations. And THAT means, crucially, that performers need not fix their interpretation, but can play 'from the same score' in different ways on different occasions.
Player-editors who ignore this, preferring to apply the conventions of later, romantic music to the scores of the classical period, may well produce articulations significantly removed from what Mozart might have expected from a performer.
That's for two reasons. First, those player-editors have views about the nature of the musical gesture that may be much at odds with what is known about the musical conventions operating when the music was written; and second, they produce a version of the score that transforms the flexible, 'thin' notation into a prescriptive 'thick' one, drastically curtailing performance freedom by adding the dynamics and slurs that they personally happen to fancy. Indeed, it's rather frightening to see the degree to which Alamiro Giampieri dominated the Italian clarinet scene for decades via his editions for Ricordi, managing to mangle the texts of Mozart, Weber, Brahms and Schumann alike to suit his own indiscriminate taste -- and of course, to suit his pocket;-) He had the audacity to print, on those editions, 'It is obligatory in performance to publish on the programme not only the name of the composer, but that of the editor, Alamiro Giampieri.'
To go back to the original question: in a student performance, the difference between an unacceptable articulation and an acceptable one -- between one that damages the listeners' understanding of the musical structure and one that supports it -- is usually one that has to be explained both in the technical world and in the emotional world. So I try to characterise articulation choices for a student in those rather general terms.
Usually, an unacceptable articulation is one that obscures important note groupings. An example for me would be bars 81-84 of K622(i), where bar 81 is clearly in 4, bar 82 in 2, and bars 83 and 84 in 1: there is a progressive calming of the rhythmic impulse. In this progression, the equal division of bar 82 is created by the two downward-hanging loops of triplets; and those loops become the single double-length semiquaver loop of bar 83. A 'mistaken' articulation in that reading would therefore be to play bar 83 as 'slur two and tongue two', creating a division of the bar into 4 and interrupting the progression towards one-in-a-bar.
A student might not agree, of course; but the point is to link the emotional description 'calming' to the technical description 'going towards a bar in one from a bar in four'. To make it 'work' the other way around (becoming MORE energetic because of the move from triplets to semiquavers) is possible but difficult; you'd need to give particular directions to the orchestra too.
To end on a lighter note: the 'best' reason I ever heard for a particular articulation in the Mozart concerto was given me by one Valentin Zakharov, to whom I was introduced in 1975 in Australia. He was the then principal clarinet of the Sydney Opera Orchestra, and I was on tour with the Fires of London, which was a British group that specialised in the music of Peter Maxwell Davies.
We decided as usual to try each other's setups; but when we got our instruments out he treated me to such a dazzling squirt of clarinet virtuosity that I felt unable to compete. So, when he looked at me expectantly, I played him a bit of the Mozart concerto.
"Ah," he said. "You know, in Russia, we play that passage staccato!"
I was puzzled. "What do you mean, 'in Russia'?" I said. "Surely you don't mean, EVERYONE in Russia?"
"Of course!" he said, with that stunning blend of implausibility and total conviction that people like him often have.
"But,...why?"
"Well, because otherwise, in a competition, we would have no way of deciding who is the best player!"
Tony
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Author: Rob Vitale
Date: 2008-06-08 01:21
hmm, I don't think there is anything wrong with spoon feeding High school students the articulations that you think work well. They're going to be playing this piece for the REST of their lives so It may we wise to give them a default, and then as they get older and can make more musically responsible decisions, they can take their own liberties.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2008-06-08 09:33
Rob Vitale wrote:
>> ....I don't think there is anything wrong with spoon feeding High school students the articulations that you think work well. They're going to be playing this piece for the REST of their lives so It may we wise to give them a default, and then as they get older and can make more musically responsible decisions, they can take their own liberties.>>
You may be right; after all, Bach wrote out 'thick', articulated versions of a few pieces for pedagogical purposes; and Mozart gave a student a worked exercise to show her the sort of thing that appropriate ornamentation involved.
But in a way -- although because of GBK's question we've been concentrating on it -- articulation is less of an issue than phrasing or bar-structure, because those last two are almost impossible to capture by prescriptive notation. Moreover, any attempt to do so, by writing in dynamics, crescendos and diminuendos and so on, inevitably kills off their essential real-time variability.
It's tragic, really, that such a beautiful and elegant system is unthinkingly corrupted by our modern attitudes.
So I maintain it's worthwhile to continue pointing out -- even to High School students -- that intelligent and thoughtful performance of the Mozart concerto involves accepting the 'thin notation' model rather than the 'choose between editions' model. Of course, it's whistling in the wind; when exactly the contrary attitude is so prevalent at even the highest level of American pedagogy, what can we expect of our poor High School teachers?
Perhaps we could say that, IN AN IDEAL WORLD, it would be more appropriate that High School students be encouraged to defer to Mozart's systems than that Mozart's music be forced to defer to the systems of American High Schools;-)
Tony
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Author: NorbertTheParrot
Date: 2008-06-08 10:36
Tony Pay wrote: "articulation is less of an issue than phrasing or bar-structure, because those last two are almost impossible to capture by prescriptive notation"
Tony, I'd be interested to know whether you'd make the same comment if you were writing, not of Mozart, but of those composers who did use prescriptive notation. Do you think:
1. Those composers - Webern was your example - somehow did find a way to describe the phrasing and bar structure they wanted, or
2. Phrasing and bar structure are less important in their music than in Mozart, so the composer's inability to notate it doesn't matter so much, or
3. They were rather wasting their time using prescriptive notation, since the notation is so inadequate anyway, or
4. Something else???
(Confession: My original musical background - such as it was - was in baroque and early music, so I find prescriptive scores rather daunting and have a strong tendency to ignore the fiddly detail and play the music as I think it should sound.)
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2008-06-08 11:10
"They're going to be playing this piece for the REST of their lives"
Maybe and maybe not. I played the Mozart concerto in high school and never played it again after that (except some bits of it that I happen to remember which I sometimes play).
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2008-06-08 13:45
Tony Pay wrote,
>>So I maintain it's worthwhile to continue pointing out -- even to High School students -- that intelligent and thoughtful performance of the Mozart concerto involves accepting the 'thin notation' model rather than the 'choose between editions' model. Of course, it's whistling in the wind; when exactly the contrary attitude is so prevalent at even the highest level of American pedagogy, what can we expect of our poor High School teachers?
>>
>>Perhaps we could say that, IN AN IDEAL WORLD, it would be more appropriate that High School students be encouraged to defer to Mozart's systems than that Mozart's music be forced to defer to the systems of American High Schools;-)
>>
I agree, I did note your ;-) and I also agree that "the contrary attitude" is prevalent in the USA, but other attitudes--in fact, just about any attitudes one could formulate--are also prevalent here, not only on the subject of how to play Mozart but on nearly any other topic one might raise. That's why the subject keeps coming up over and over and over, and no doubt will continue to arise.
But as for that ideal world, you know the old saying about herding cats. Not only the attitudes but the rigor of the attitudes varies so enormously here that persuading cats to herd cockroaches into orderly lines and dance the Conga with them might be more feasible than persuading Americans to teach in any particular way. We've got dictatorial pedagogues; we've got permissives who express their own insecurities by advising even the smallest children to interpret music in whatever ways their hearts desire; we've got seekers after Ultimate Truth who change their gods (and their students' embouchures, reeds and mouthpieces) every two weeks, we've got....
(I'm visualizing a stage full of people costumed as instructors--wearing everything from cut-off bluejeans to designer suits to birthday suits--striking attitudes in a satirical sketch ripped off from Gilbert & Sullivan.... "Basingstoke!")
Tony, have you ever travelled across the USA by bus or by car? Airplane flight masks the huge size of this country. Most of us here are genetic and cultural mutts. I don't think there's any such thing as a North American attitude about anything. I love your 20-year-old recording--and I'd love for you to record the concerto again with the OAE, now that you've described how your playing has changed. Then you could watch people here and on the Klarinet list bicker over which version's best.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
Post Edited (2008-06-08 13:49)
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2008-06-09 15:07
NorbertTheParrot wrote:
>> Do you think:
1. [Composers who used prescriptive notation] - Webern was your example - somehow did find a way to describe the phrasing and bar structure they wanted, or
2. Phrasing and bar structure are less important in their music than in Mozart, so the composer's inability to notate it doesn't matter so much, or
3. They were rather wasting their time using prescriptive notation, since the notation is so inadequate anyway, or
4. Something else???>>
It's an interesting question. I'll go for saying yes to 2 rather than 1, and then yes to 4:-) unpacking it a bit more by referring you to:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/1999/09/000786.txt
WRT 3, a part of the difficulty of prescriptive notation is that it doesn't allow the performer sufficiently into the creative process -- or at any rate, in quite the satisfying way that earlier music, particularly classical music, does. Various solutions to that have been tried, but I think it's still an issue.
Tony
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Author: William
Date: 2008-06-09 15:28
Wow---a very interesting discussion, but boardering on paralysis by analysis. Why can't we all simply play music the way Duke suggested, "If it sounds good, it is good" ?? ;>)
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Author: NorbertTheParrot
Date: 2008-06-10 07:26
Tony, thank you for the reference:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/1999/09/000786.txt
which I found very insightful (although I don't share your admiration of Goodman and Copland).
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Author: Bassie
Date: 2008-06-10 15:23
Hm, once you start thinking about the number of significant and different styles out there - swing, classical, baroque etc. - it all gets very interesting! I used to sing in a choir with a choirmaster who went the extra mile to try to explain these things. One year we did Bach, Mozart and Walton. Same black dots on the page... totally different performance. I remember doing scale exercises, as a choir, /in the style of the piece/...
I suppose when you study a piece for long enough the broader shapes and intents become more obvious. It makes sense, in the context of the piece as a whole and the body of work of which it's a part, to interpret it a particular way.
On a related note, how does one go about interpreting composers who travelled and soaked up foreign styles? Kodaly, for example, who started fairly Slavic but went to the US and discovered the blue note...
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Author: allencole
Date: 2008-06-11 04:29
I appreciate some Tony's explanation about the responsiveness of certain instruments, and the effect that might have on articulations.
My own conclusion is that the soloist has an obligation to reach the listener, and that it's not unreasonable to select articulation that in some cases forgives flaws and in some cases showcases particular strengths.
When I get to work with a kid on this piece, I have two main concerns about articulation:
1 - that they don't use it as a crutch to avoid problems that practice could solve
2 - that they be pragmatic about it, and listen to some name players approach it. (fairly easy with the advent of YouTube)
A third concern would be that they recognize that there are preferred editions and conflicting schools of thought (on many other subjects also) that they may have pay homage to as they progress in their study and get the opportunity to work with higher-ranking teachers and adjudicators.
Allen Cole
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2008-06-11 09:22
Allen Cole wrote:
>> My own conclusion is that the soloist has an obligation to reach the listener, and that it's not unreasonable to select articulation that in some cases forgives flaws and in some cases showcases particular strengths.>>
I would have been grateful, as a 16-year old soloist with the National Youth Orchestra on a tour of German, Russian and Scandinavian cities in 1961, to have been told that bar 13 (!) of the clarinet part was not NECESSARILY intended by Mozart to be played staccato, as it appears in the Boosey and Hawkes edition we all used. Struggling with my tongue as I was at the time, I would lie awake wondering whether I would screw it up on the evening of the NEXT day, in the NEXT important concert hall.
That information, that I didn't get, could easily have been supplemented by some advice on how to make the run sound dramatic even if played legato -- or rather, even if played non-articulated but using a different SORT of non-articulation. (One is tempted to say, 'a different sort of legato'; but perhaps the word 'legato' is best reserved for the seamless sort.)
When you say:
>> A third concern would be that they recognize that there are preferred editions and conflicting schools of thought (on many other subjects also) that they may have pay homage to as they progress in their study and get the opportunity to work with higher-ranking teachers and adjudicators.>>
...of course I agree with you. Students need to understand that in order to get on in the world, they must kowtow to wrongheaded people in positions of power. (It's a very important part of one's education.)
Tony
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Author: allencole
Date: 2008-06-12 02:12
Tony Pay wrote:
Students need to understand
> that in order to get on in the world, they must kowtow to
> wrongheaded people in positions of power. (It's a very
> important part of one's education.)
>
Buffet and Vandoren are banking on it. <g>
Allen Cole
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2008-06-12 11:29
Tony Pay wrote:
Students need to understand
> that in order to get on in the world, they must kowtow to
> wrongheaded people in positions of power. (It's a very
> important part of one's education.)
>
For the long-suffering student, it's an education in deferred gratification, too: Success is the best revenge. And if that's not enough, after kowtowing sufficiently to rise to a position of power oneself: Turn around, drop trou and give the wrongheaded people a reverse kowtow, aka a good mooning. May have to be done via séance, alas--viz. Berlioz and the French Academy--but posthumous vindication is better than none.
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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