 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: jeeves
Date: 2019-09-01 21:36
I'm working on part of the first movement of Weber 1 right now, and I don't understand how to interpret the articulation markings in the passage starting at bar 130 (second page of http://ks.petruccimusiclibrary.org/files/imglnks/usimg/5/5b/IMSLP308278-PMLP24385-Kalmus1.pdf).
From searching around, it seems like staccato under slur generally means legato tonguing, but there are some bars where I'm not sure what to do. In bar 133 (attached), should the first note with a staccato mark be tongued? Why do the first four notes have a slur mark when the entire bar is already under a slur? Should the last note in the bar and the last note of the second triplet be tongued or clipped short?
Post Edited (2019-09-01 21:41)
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2019-09-01 22:08
Weber didn't write that articulation. There is also the well-known version by Carl Bärmann (son of the clarinetist that Weber wrote it for), but even he didn't write it the way that it is in your edition. So I don't think that it's worth even pondering how to play the notation presented here. Buy the Henle edition so that you can get more information about what Weber and Bärmann actually wrote. Then you'll be in a better position to make your own decisions about how to articulate passages like this.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2019-09-01 22:27
If you are asking strictly about how to make is SOUND, I'd say check out the Karl Leister recording from the 70's. It is somewhat just a 'skipping,' almost giocoso sort of sound.
..............Paul Aviles
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2019-09-01 22:42
The short, general answer to the various parts of your question is, don't sweat these details so much.
I'm not sure what a couple of those dots mean, either, but it doesn't really matter. When you see articulations that are that fussy in relatively early solo works you have to suspect that some performer/editor added them long after the composer and probably anyone with first-hand knowledge of the composer's intention had passed on.
In the Henle (2002) edition, two versions are provided - one is the editors' best attempt to reproduce what Weber probably meant, based on the existing versions into which he would have had input. The measure you excerpted is shown with each triplet group under its own slur. It contrasts with the first appearance in bar 131, which is almost all staccato. The articulations throughout the whole passage are much more straightforward than the ones in IMSLP's version, which is apparently from a 20th century Breitkopf edition made by someone named Willy Schreinicke. Even the transcription of Heinrich Baermann's performance notes included in the Henle edition is more straightforward.
In general, "dots under a slur" notation is borrowed from string markings ("hooked bowing"). For a string player, the slur means to keep the bow moving in the same direction instead of changing direction for each note, while the dots mean to stop the bow to separate the notes lightly. For wind (and even piano) articulation dots under slurs mean essentially the same effect - keep the direction (air, in the case of a wind instrument) moving forward, but separate lightly.
Whatever dots you decide to observe in that passage, the dot implies separation from the other notes around it, but without stopping the progress of the phrase. If I were to try to play what's written in bar 133 that you excerpted, I'd probably lightly tongue each note of the 2nd beat triplet, slurring the first and third beats. But in the end what really matters more is the marking "lusingando e con espressione," which you ought to Google and then try to apply to whatever articulations you do.
Karl
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Author: Tom H
Date: 2019-09-02 01:59
I'm unable to download your examples, but tend to agree with what Karl says. I have performed both concertos & the Concertino often and admit that I don't always play the articulations as written. I believe it is also true that Mozart wrote in very few articulations and dynamics in his Concerto. Play it as you like and be musical. I tend to tongue more than I should at times, as this is a strong point in my playing-- I have to watch that.
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Post Edited (2019-09-02 02:00)
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Author: cigleris
Date: 2019-09-02 03:42
Actually kdk,
the Henle edition is Weber’s original solo part and Carl Baermann’s published version from what he remembered his father to have played. They are not reproducing what Weber might have meant they are reproducing from extensive research what Weber wrote and what was then played thereafter. Carl Baermann’s version is interesting because it sheds light on what might have been expected in the 1870s. Whether much of that is what Heinrich did one will never know so it’s best to use your musical intelligence and come up with a version from both solo parts.
Peter Cigleris
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2019-09-02 06:42
cigleris wrote:
> Actually kdk,
>
> the Henle edition is Weber’s original solo part and Carl
> Baermann’s published version from what he remembered his
> father to have played. They are not reproducing what Weber
> might have meant they are reproducing from extensive research
> what Weber wrote and what was then played thereafter.
There are two solo parts in the Henle edition. As I read the Preface, one is based on the two earliest published editions by Schlesinger (one for clarinet and piano, the other providing the orchestra parts) and an autograph score Weber had kept in his library. It is meant to be as close as the editors can get to what Weber wanted to have published. The other is a revised version "prepared by the purported eye-witness Carl Baermann partly on the basis of textual intervention by his father, Weber's friend Heinrich Baermann."
> Carl Baermann’s version is interesting because it sheds light on
> what might have been expected in the 1870s.
Yes. That's why Henle includes both versions. And a number of features from the Baermann version have served as the basis for editorial decisions made by editor/performers ever since, judging from the pre-Henle editions I own. But the Henle version meant to present an Urtext was, as I read the Preface, not prepared from Baermann's material or his performance elaborations.
Karl
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2019-09-02 17:18
Every edition of Weber and Mozart's works are different so as some have suggested, listen to a recording or two and use you're musical instincts. Light tonguing is alway good, ultra short is not. Slurring some passages is good as well.
ESP eddiesclarinet.com
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2019-09-02 18:50
I don't know if this is an issue for jeeves or if he just picked this edition because it's a free online download, but one problem relating to jeeve's question comes up when state or local adjudications require specific editions with the instruction that auditioning students *must* perform all markings (including articulations) as printed in that edition. The purpose is to try as much as possible to have everyone audition on a "level playing field." The actual result is that students and their teachers feel straitjacketed into doing things that range from editors' personal whims all the way to outright errata that have never been corrected. Most of the editions used in school auditions (PA Mus Ed Ass'n - PMEA is an example I'm familiar with first-hand) are chosen because they're inexpensive and easily available and not for their scholarly basis.
By way of an example, I'll digress slightly to rant a little against required editions. Feel free to stop reading here if you like.
I recently had an exchange of emails with the president of the PMEA district I teach in about the upcoming auditions that require Kell's edition of the Mozart Concerto (specifically the Rondo). The articulations and dynamic marks he added, most of which are clearly indicated in parentheses, are OK, if not totally best-practice by modern standards. But near the end, in a passage we're all very familiar with - bars 311-314, Kell notates it between C4 and C5 (crossing the break). That's the way countless clarinetists up through the mid-20th century played and recorded it and the way many editions engraved the passage.
But, I guess, the scholarship about basset clarinets had convinced major clarinetists, including Kell, that the passage was actually meant to be played on a basset clarinet an octave lower, entirely in the chalumeau register, with the notes ranging from C4 down to C3. Kell solves this problem very simply by placing an 8va basso (octave lower) marking under the passage. Now it's historically correct. Much easier to play than the throat note version.
Except that most school-age clarinet students don't even own an A clarinet (so they start off playing the piece strictly speaking in the wrong key). But none of them can be expected to own a basset clarinet (in either A or Bb) so the instruction to play the low C an octave lower is for them not possible. They literally *can't* play the written script. Clarinetists who became aware of the problem in the mid-1900s found any number of work-arounds to deal with the low C without investing in basset clarinets, but the students auditioning for PMEA district bands who try to adopt one of these solutions aren't playing what Kell wrote, either. So the upshot is that for this passage, following PMEA's instructions is just not possible.
The easiest solution to the problem is to not include that passage in the audition. I got our local Bucks County MEA to do just that several 3-year cycles ago. But it was only this year that I got a sympathetic PMEA District president to take the problem seriously and offer to instruct the judges not to ask for it.
There are other problems, not all of them so intractable, in other pieces we use for these auditions. These pieces are in PA repeated on a 3-year cycle, so the problems in the required editions keep coming back. I only know about the clarinet rotation. I know absolutely nothing about the editorial quality of the pieces used, also in rotation, for the other dozen or so instruments on the audition list.
IMO the best solution, which makes the administrators of the auditions very nervous, would be to let students find their own best reading of each piece (and their own - or their teachers' - best solutions to these editorial problems) and stop requiring them to stick slavishly to the choices made by a specific editor. Some students would play easier solutions, others would try to show off with more elaborate ones, but in the end, a student either plays a piece convincingly and musically with control and a sense of style or he doesn't.
Sorry for the rant (well, not really, but I did warn you ).
Karl
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2019-09-05 12:28
More suggestive for me than either of the Henle solo parts is to consider what is happening at this point in the music. We’ve just had a wonderful declamatory passage, doubtless written to showcase Baermann’s powerful and expressive sound, and now we’re in a much more intimate register.
I sometimes suggest to myself that the bit beginning on the high Bb represents an orator king giving his vision to his country (including the military in bar 9:-) But then, he has to explain himself to the children, which he does in a very intimate manner. In Weber’s manuscript, this triplet passage beginning on the throat Bb has no dynamic or articulation marks at all, to begin with, seeming to me to argue for a very simple approach.
The first marking occurs on the third beat of the fifth bar of the section, over which Ab Weber writes an accent, corresponding to the added tension of the harmony in the strings. If you mess about with beat 3 of bars two and four as in the editions, you destroy the power of this nuance.
There’s more to say about how harmonic considerations affect choice of articulation later, too. Without going into too much detail, you can identify appoggiaturas in the solo line that give opportunities for nuance: in bar 9 for example, where triplets 2&3, 4&5 can profitably be slurred together as appoggiaturas customarily were in the style.
This approach sets the stage for the much more playful Baermann cadenza – which he was quite right to suggest including in my opinion, contrary to some purists.
Tony
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