 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: samsmash
Date: 2013-07-08 11:57
Does anyone have any suggestions on playing this piece because I'm doing the 2nd and 3rd movements for grade 8 and I'm struggling to give them all the emotive playing that they deserve - especially considering that technically they are relatively easy compared to other pieces on the syllabus.
Thanks!
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-07-08 12:41
I suppose a good question to start with would be, why do YOU consider they 'deserve emotive playing'? In other words, what would have YOU decide WHICH emotions need to be portrayed?
Then you may start to get an handle on how to approach the music, which I suppose is the point of the exercise.
Emotion isn't like tomato ketchup. (That's just the one flavour, and it gets applied indiscriminately.)
Ken Shaw -- who I seem to be encountering at every turn at the moment -- previously pointed someone else towards Steven Isserlis's 'cello masterclass, which I didn't like much, and provided some musical ideas of his own, with which I disagreed.
Actually I dislike almost all 'cello players' take on these pieces: they have something of the tomato ketchup tendency. (You can hear them 'celebrating being wonderful performers' -- as if.)
An exception was the American Ronald Thomas, whom I found myself admiring -- despite his playing them 'on the wrong instrument':-)
Tony
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Author: Tobin
Date: 2013-07-08 14:01
Sam -- you've inadvertently landed in a BB disagreement between long-time members. If you can ignore the aspersions and concentrate on the information that is significant to your question I'd recommend it.
The music will never be anything until you decide what it is to you. For younger musicians it is sometimes easier to interpret music that is "technically" busy. Maybe for the sole reason that with greater material you have an easier time deducing what you should or (more importantly) WANT to do.
If you are considering the music solely or significantly from your contribution alone that will be the primary source of the problem. You must consider the whole to begin to decide what it is to you.
Your imagination is most certainly your greatest asset here: spend time hearing it as you believe it should be. Your goal is not to reproduce it only as Schumann wrote it, but as a collaboration of what Schumann wrote and you believe it to be.
James
Gnothi Seauton
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-07-08 14:17
samsmash -
I urge you to listen to the Isserlis masterclass and decide for yourself. Don't take Tony's word for it. Or mine. As Tony often and correctly reminds us, it's your insights that make the difference.
Ken Shaw
Post Edited (2013-07-08 14:32)
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-07-08 14:32
Dear, dear Tony -
You started this one, so I'll finish it. It's about your grammar. It's "whom" I seem to be encountering, not "who." Once again I'm the professional grammarian and editor. You're merely the convenient ignoramus.
You're of course entitled to dislike and even refuse to listen to any and every every cellist's approach to the Schumann Fantasiestucke. You also may (and do) heap scorn on me (and anyone else) for preferring to decide matters for myself, instead of browning my nose up your ass.
You don't speak for me. I find much to learn from listening to great musicians, even cellists, performing Schumann. On this one, I'd rather be me than you.
Ken Shaw
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-07-08 14:54
Ken Shaw wrote:
> Dear, dear Tony -
>
> On this
> one, I'd rather be me than you.
Awkward as it sounds, shouldn't this be "I'd rather be I...?" To be is intransitive and takes a nominative compliment. "Me" is objective and needs to follow a transitive verb. It sounds awful, but rules are rules.
:) Just wondering...
Karl
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-07-08 15:22
To respond more directly to your question about playing the Schumann, concrete suggestions are hard to make here because none of us can hear where you have already come with the piece. It's more than possible to try too hard to add emotive features, distorting the core in the attempt to personalize a performance. Tony warns against applying emotive elements like ketchup. If your question comes because you've already poured the ketchup and don't like the taste, the suggestions might be different from those that might come if your present approach is lacking any accent or point of view.
I assume you're studying this with a teacher. He or she, acting as coach as well as technical instructor, can at least react to where you already are. You might give us an idea, if you can, of what's been involved in the struggle you've been engaged in.
Karl
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-07-08 15:25
A thing to consider in the second movement is this: pretty clearly the first phrase on the piano is light-hearted -- largish leaps, major key, perhaps a bit bouncy. Then, the clarinet enters, and between the second half of the first complete bar and the second bar, the mood changes. The key goes minor, the clarinet has a descending, sighing scalic phrase -- GF#E, a filling in of the falling GE in the key of E minor. (I'm using the notation of the A clarinet part.) Then we're immediately back to light-heartedness in the piano.
And, that all happens very fast -- too fast for the music to 'belong' to one person. (One person can't go from happy to sad and then back again in a moment.)
So, it can be like a fairy story: you can talk about the happy princess, and then immediately switch to her sad sister. And then, almost immediately back again:-)
That's in contrast to the first movement, where we're dealing with the inner life of one person, perhaps from sad resignation, through hope, to desperation and final acceptance. All of that happens much more gradually.
Skipping over the central section, I quite like to think of the final coda as being a portrayal of our noticing that the child to whom we've been telling the story is now asleep, and our leaving the room carefully, still whispering, so as not to wake them....the written GDE like a caress, being a decoration of the GE falling third -- this time part of a major chord, and a nuance that is so often emotionally potent in this sort of music.
You must make up your own take on the music, of course. But the fundamental idea is to use your playing of intervals -- the SOUL of music, as Nielsen said -- to inhabit the emotional dimension.
(Or, you could play it all, in another characterisation of the tomato-ketchup approach, "with saliva running down your chin."
I wonder who said that?-)
Think about it for yourself; afterwards I might say a bit more, to push you along a bit farther.
Tony
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-07-08 17:13
I sometimes play a recital in which I interleave the movements of the Schumann Fantasiestucke and the Stravinsky Three pieces. I don't know whether the idea behind it might spark anything in you, but here is the programme note for the recital, which also includes music by Debussy (Rhapsodie), John Cage (Sonata for solo clarinet and 4'33"), Saint-Saens (Sonata), Delgado (Langara') and Bernstein (Sonata).
If it doesn't spark anything in you, ignore it:-)
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This recital, as well as containing at least four deservedly famous works for both clarinet and piano duo and solo clarinet, is also intended to be a demonstration of the degree to which context affects our musical perception.
The work of the American composer John Cage was particularly concerned with the relationship of context to content; and we include here two of his pieces, of which one is almost entirely content and the other entirely context. The construction of the rest of the programme is also concerned with the context/content relationship.
That relationship was appreciated by composers and performers long before Cage represented its extremes. But to make the relationship more vivid, we have indulged in some unusual programming.
The first example is an attempt to underline what I have always felt to be a striking parallel between two masterpieces of the clarinet repertoire: namely the Stravinsky Three Pieces for solo clarinet and the Schumann Fantasiestücke op 73 for clarinet and piano. Of course, these works are quite different in style and technique; but they use different expressive registers in a really quite similar way.
To see this, recall that a single player can be required at any given moment to respond to their part within (at least) three different sorts of context. Another way of putting it is to say that they can be required to adopt any one of (at least) three different expressive registers -- or more conveniently, just, 'registers'.
Two of those registers have the characteristic of what might be called the 'single-person stance', because in them we approach the music with the emotions and behaviours of a single person. They invite the player to inhabit and represent a character. The first such register is inward, and speaks of the inner life of a person; whilst the second register is outward, and speaks of the actions of a person.
The remaining register of the three, the 'narrative' register, may not include any persons at all -- an example would be a piece entitiled 'Dawn', when 'descriptive' might be a better name for it -- or it may include several persons, as does the piece by Delgado in this programme, which attempts to portray an argument between three separate characters, as well as something of the nature of the Portuguese language.
Another thing this register can do is to tell a story.
The Schumann and the Stravinsky match each other movement by movement in the registers they demand of the performer. So, the quirk in our programme is to interleave the movements of the Schumann and the Stravinsky, with slight modifications in order to ensure musical continuity.
The first movement of each is introspective, and follows the emotional rules of the inner life: namely, that because emotion is typically mediated by chemical changes in the body that persist independently of thought, no deep feeling can disappear suddenly. (This is why 'sostenuto' is a common feature of emotional music.)
The second movement of each is narrative. Different characters are described and (perhaps) briefly inhabited, and fast changes of mood are called for.
The last movements are both personal action. In the Schumann, there is a brief moment of reflection prior to the final climax. It's rather like being at a party, and looking round for a few moments at what everyone else is doing before being dragged back into the dance. In the Stravinsky, there is no such moment -- like the chosen maiden in Le Sacre, we cannot escape.
Of the Cage pieces, the first, coming after the Bernstein Sonata, is the famous 4'33". This piece is all context. The second, the Sonata for solo clarinet, is almost all content, in that there are no expression marks, dynamics or phrasing -- just notes. The context we have provided consists of the movements of the Saint-Saens Sonata.
The whole concert is framed by the Brahms and Debussy masterpieces.
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Tony
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2013-07-08 17:33
Dare I refer to another master class?
Here are the thoughts of Karl Leister in 2 1/2 hour master class that includes the Schumann (2nd one on program). So many other good things to hear in here. Well worth your time.
http://www.pickstaiger.org/video/clarinet-master-class-karl-leister
...................Paul Aviles
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-07-08 18:05
So I had another look at Isserlis's masterclass extract, that I said I remembered didn't like.
It's not so bad. But...
Three important things he didn't call the student's attention to in the first movement:
(1) The accent (<> : it means, 'special'; it often meant 'vibrato' in string playing) on the second beat Ab (written) of the first bar, ECHOES the fp F natural concert of the first bar of the piano, and goes against the metrical structure of the bar.
Such relationships are fundamental to the piece. You can't just talk about the solo line.
(2) The fact that the triplets in the piano all fall, and that the solo line 'leaps up' only in order to 'fall in scale patterns' in the first section.
That realisation allows you to underline the 'falling', superlegato, sad nature of the music.
(3) That the bass line stops being in octaves when the solo line starts to RISE chromatically in the 'hopeful' bit, and that the triplets change direction to be 'rising' at that moment. The whole texture changes.
Here, the solo line 'rises in scale patterns', 'hopefully'. We progressively get more confident, to the point where the Eb octave to Ab major allows us some temporary resolution.
Isserlis is not giving the student tools to look at music. He is giving her HIS take on the piece.
I say, contra some others here, that one needs to do in music is to start by LOOKING AT WHAT IS THERE, with some understanding of the ways in which we may make it live. The ways in which the players of the time made it live may help us.
When the maestro isn't present, you need that attitude. Otherwise, you just have the memory of what he told you to do.
As Rudolf Kempe said: "One must not search, one must find. Searching implies conscious manipulation. Finding is a result of devotion to a composer and his music."
Tony
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-07-08 18:35
We probably shouldn't lose the fact that Sam isn't planning to play the first movement - only 2 and 3.
But I appreciate the commentary on the first movement in any event.
Karl
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-07-08 18:44
Here's the thread -- other than the Isserlis one -- that I was talking about:
http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=304417&t=304329
The bottom line of my argument is: phrasing is NOT based on harmony. It is an autonomous structure that sometimes falls with, and sometimes doesn't fall with, the harmony.
It's also an autonomous structure that sometimes falls with, and sometimes doesn't fall with, the metric structure of the bar.
You GET SO MUCH MUSICAL UNDERSTANDING of this music out of those realisations, if you take them on.
Tony
Post Edited (2013-07-08 19:30)
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Author: Barry Vincent
Date: 2013-07-08 20:07
Like so many concert programs , the Brahms is to get the audience to show up , and the Debussy is to make sure they stay till the end of the concert.
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Author: davyd
Date: 2013-07-08 22:21
4' 33" - I didn't know there was a clarinet/piano version. Or is it for clarinet unaccompanied? Seriously: what is the context of the piece in this context?
When I studied the Schumann pieces, my teacher said they were all about the conflict between Schumann's alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius. I don't recall what that told me about how to interpret the piece, but it made sense at the time.
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Author: samsmash
Date: 2013-07-09 14:34
Thanks everyone for the replies!
You've left me with a lot to think on...
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Author: dtiegs
Date: 2013-07-11 01:50
I recently played the I and II movements at State Solo Fest in Idaho, and I placed second in the state. (I might add that the All North West first chair won first.) While I do not believe that I deserved such high accolades, the judge's comments were positive. They appreciated that I played a solo that I could "perfect", unlike other competitors who played much harder pieces with less "finess".
My teacher was adamant about listening to other players. What I found was that there were so many ways of interpreting the music on YouTube alone. She asked me to make a few copies of my music, and choose the top three I and write down in the music what I appreciated and what the audience would too and what I didn't appreciate. My notes were then reviewed and questioned by my teacher who approved the "notes" I took.
The idea that she kept hammering in was to pay attention to the phrases. Often, she would ask me to play what I believed to be a "phrase" and stop. She would then begin by asking, "Was that a complete idea? Would that have been a complete, beautiful sentence?" We would continue to go over and over this process, until we both agreed on a style of phrasing.
Once I believed that I had polished everything I could, my instructor asked me to record myself. The recordings allowed me to evaluate the ideas I needed to convey through performing, and ask myself: "Is this what I want my audience to experience?"
DTiegs
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-07-11 13:37
DTiegs -
Congratulations. From your thoughtful explanation, you clearly earned the praise you got.
One bit of advice for the next step. Play the clarinet line until you have it completely memorized, so that your fingers play it almost without input your mind.
Then play from the score, letting your fingers play the clarinet part but reading the bass line and hearing the harmony. When I started doing that, I was amazed at what I heard and, eventually, how much better I played.
Then read Tony Pay's essential article Phrasing in Contention for a world of ideas about how to go beyond phrasing with the harmony.
Ken Shaw
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-07-11 14:23
I suppose what I want to say to DTiegs is: it isn't a solo.
I'm reminded of what Thea King used to say to clarinet players: "You realise that Schumann (Brahms, Mozart,...) NEVER EVER SAW what you have in front of you?"
This sort of music is very often mosaic.
Tony
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Author: eac
Date: 2013-07-11 15:16
Does anyone know a source for a recording of the piano part to accompany the Bb clarinet part? I would love to work these numbers with the piano but all the piano recordings I have found are for the A clarinet part. Since I play only in a community band, I simply cannot justify purchasing an A clarinet. Thanks!
Liz Leckey
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-07-11 16:11
Liz -
Get the MusicMinusOne CD and load it into Audacity to raise the pitch 1/2 step. Keep the tempo the same.
Also, #1 is very frequently played on the Bb, transposing half a step down. This replaces a couple of treacherous wide slurs with more secure ones. It's possible, though less easy, to transpose everything on the Bb. There are a some low Es for the A clarinet, but they can be worked around, particularly in your living room.
Transposing is one of the essential things you learn as you get better. You start with 1/2 step down to play A clarinet parts. Schumann #1 is perfect for this. It's fairly slow and has lots of step-wise motion to keep yourself oriented. Believe it or not, the first movement of the Mozart Quintet is very playable on the Bb, reading 1/2 step down. I think you may even be able to find it on the Web.
About the time you get fluent in 1/2 step down, you get good enough to need an A clarinet. Coincidence? I don' think so! ![[happy]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smiley12.gif)
Once you learn 1/2 step down, it's a tremendous relief to learn 1 full step up, which is essential for C clarinet parts and for jumping in to help the 2nd oboe or the 3rd flutes.
Ken Shaw
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Author: Tobin
Date: 2013-07-11 16:47
Liz --
Pay $40 to Smartmusic for a year subscription and you'll have all the piano accompaniments to the majority of the basic clarinet rep, and you'll be able to stop and start it where you like, change tempo as you want, record yourself, etc...
Awesome program.
James
Gnothi Seauton
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Author: Jack Kissinger
Date: 2013-07-11 17:04
Liz,
Do you have a Bb clarinet part or do you want to play the A part on Bb clarinet without transposing? If the former (which is how I read what you wrote), then any recording that works for the A clarinet will work for your part because your part has been transposed so it can play with a piano playing the normal part. If the latter, you can try what Ken suggests.
Best regards,
jnk
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-07-11 17:11
FWIW, Peters publishes (or did) a Bb transposition of the clarinet part (Edition Peters Nr. 23669 - copyright 1962) - so it's in the same concert keys as the A clarinet original and uses the original piano part. That the original isn't particularly treacherous in the first place leaves this Bb version playable, if a little more awkward.
Karl
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Author: davyd
Date: 2013-07-11 18:14
Masterworks for Clarinet & Piano (ed. Simon, pub. Schirmer) has the three pieces for either A or Bb clarinet, with the same accompaniment.
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-07-11 18:45
I own the Concert and Contest Solos LP. The player is Robert McGinnis, then the principal of the New York Philharmonic and Stokie's original clarinet genius in Philadelphia (prior to Bonade).
Ken Shaw
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Author: eac
Date: 2013-07-11 19:25
Thanks for all the recording sources transpositions tips!
Liz Leckey
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Author: fernie51296
Date: 2013-07-13 04:30
I second Paul's advice about Karl Leister's master class. And while your at it you'd be best to watch the whole thing rather than just the Schumann part
Fernando
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