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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The Clarinet BBoard
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