 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-14 16:17
I worked many years as a software engineer for a machine tool manufacturer. Over time that work informed me that the definition of software is in three parts: first, a vague idea in a customer's head about what they want; next, a vague interpretation of that idea in the heads of the engineers; and finally, a vague impression of how it works in the heads of the end users. Note that what the customers say they want turns out to often be different, or even at odds with, what the end users need. The links between the three sets of minds are also impeded by the usual types of distortion and noise.
In music, I imagine a similar definition that substitutes composer, performer, and listener in place of customer, engineer, and end user. Vague, vague, and vague. In the end, anything that's clear is art.
The idea of composers' intentions should be treated with respect, but the listeners' needs and situations are at least as important. Further, the performer is more than just a link between composer and listener. All three own the music equally.
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2025-06-14 16:48
Hi Philip,
I really enjoyed your thought-provoking post.
Perhaps the conductor could be the lower manager who believes he knows what the customer/composer wanted, and how to get the users produce those results?
I might see the correlation for classical music...not sure if I see a correlation for non-classical.
Pop tunes of the 1930s and 1940s were adapted and performed by several different bands/groups in a very short period of time. The individual bands' arrangers rewrote the parts to have different intros, different beat emphasis, different swing, different instrumentation, etc. Today's pop groups do the same thing - just over a much longer course of time.
So - I think pop, jazz, folk, and most other types of non-classical music - generally use the composer's work as a loose idea on which to build upon - and not a literal request/command (probably not a statement which flatters composers, but I think this is the reality).
Fuzzy
;^)>>>
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-06-14 18:05
I believe in closely following a composer's intentions and markings, with one exception: metronome markings. I have worked with many composers -never Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart or Brahms, I must admit- and found that they were incredibly slipshod about metronome markings and didn't respect them themselves. Mind you, a work has a life of its own and when composers go back to pieces they had written a long time ago, they have sometimes changed their mind about them.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
Post Edited (2025-06-14 21:04)
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-06-15 02:20
Quote:
In music, I imagine a similar definition that substitutes composer, performer, and listener in place of customer, engineer, and end user. Vague, vague, and vague.
The French musicologist and semiotician Jean-Jacques Nattiez examines this idea in his book Music and Discourse, though he uses the terms "producer," "message," and "receiver."
For Nattiez, the producer (you could substitute composer here) goes through various "poietic" processes to arrive at his or her message or piece of music. These processes range from deliberations about what's to be done ("Do I want a full cadence here or a half cadence?") to the actual production of the work (physically putting notes onto staff paper).
The receiver (performer) must then interpret the message. Importantly for Nattiez, interpretation is active: "Why is there an accent here on this pitch? How should I perform it?" It's not as though interpreters mindlessly receive instructions and then execute them: "Oh, this C has an accent. I therefore need to play it louder than the surrounding pitches." (Now, I know many musicians think this way. Unfortunately, it seems to be a result of poor training, which then gets passed down to the next generation of students.)
When a performer plays a piece of music, then, he or she becomes another producer, the performance itself another message, and the audience another receiver. And the whole thing continues branching outward (with reviews, recordings, etc.).
Not everything a composer puts into a piece is going to be picked up by the performer (Nattiez uses the term "trace" here). And similarly, not everything a musician puts into a performance is going to be noticed by the audience. But perhaps it's good to think of it this way. The 19th century's version of things, where we gather at the cathedral/concert hall to hear the word of God/Wagner, is rather boring.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-15 21:57
Hi brycon. Thank you for the reference to Nattiez's book. I may see if I can locate it. If it's in French, I may not.
Ah, how to play a given accent. Or diminuendo. Or tempo indication. etc. I assume good performers routinely ask themselves questions such as, what was intended by this marking? - what is supposed to be expressed here? - what are the possibilities available in this? Presumably the answers to these and similar questions are often implemented in finer detail than many listeners will discern, but the overall process generally helps bring the music to life for the audience.
Pianist - great pianist - Sviatoslav Richter was a stickler for playing what was written, yet his playing was nonetheless idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable. When asked about his interpretations he repeatedly would insist that it was "all in the score."
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-06-16 00:50
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Hi brycon. Thank you for the reference to Nattiez's book. I may see if I can locate it. If it's in French, I may not.
You can find it in English (translated by Carolyn Abbate): https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691027142/music-and-discourse?srsltid=AfmBOop74e3FGN5pHgDzDj-cTGRsnNFUXguT0BG2BqtVc2YCzawjQur9
Probably available for less through Amazon.
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Pianist - great pianist - Sviatoslav Richter was a stickler for playing what was written, yet his playing was nonetheless idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable. When asked about his interpretations he repeatedly would insist that it was "all in the score."
I've listened to Richter but don't know much about him as a musician. I suspect what he meant by "all in the score" is that his decisions were based on the music itself: the counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, phrase rhythm, etc. I can't imagine he thought of himself as mindlessly executing only the expressive markings on the page. And even if he did think that way, he didn't play that way.
Because the "Pathetique" was on my mind, I pulled up Richter playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teUW_NstKWY
To take just one example from the opening, he delays slightly the downbeat dominant chord of m. 9 (when the music comes to a stop in the left hand) despite Beethoven not giving any indication to manipulate the tempo here. Again, at the end of bar 9, he rhythmically delays and changes the color of the deceptive cadence on beat 3 (again, Beethoven doesn't give any indication to do so). These nuances aren't indicated by Beethoven. In another sense, however, they're compositional "licks," a dominant arrival and a deceptive cadence, that are in the score and that a performer perhaps ought to show.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-19 16:27
Thank you for that example, Brycon, it was nice to listen to this morning. Richter presses and relaxes the tempo throughout those initial bars, and I wish I had the musical vocabulary you mention to hook my thoughts about such things to. Throughout his career, Richter's playing, even in delicate passages, almost always sounded emphatic, as though everything he did was emphasized, and some listeners don't like that. For me it's well within the range of appreciable styles.
Richter had one of the most prodigious musical memories ever, covering a vast repertoire. However, he said he had to keep checking it, even with pieces he often played. He recounted how after a recital an admirer came to congratulate him but also to point out that he'd played a wrong note (I think it was in a Beethoven sonata.) Richter checked the score and was horrified to see that indeed, his memory had changed that note, and he had no idea how long he'd been playing it that way. Composer's intentions thwarted again!
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-19 16:55
Just to follow on from Brycon's example, Beethoven marks the initial declamatory chords "fp", not a marking often seen in piano music. I've only heard one pianist that actually did that, and it was Edwin Fischer. It's unclear to me how he managed it, but I suspect nonstandard technique, at least in pre-modern piano music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc_E8W6HhUY
What did the composer intend with that deliberate marking choice? Other artists just play the chords more or less forte and let them naturally decay, then play the following notes more softly, as though the composer had written a decrescendo below a forte chord with the following notes piano instead of "fp".
Fischer, though, did it. Was it successful, hmm. Busoni said something like, "always assume anything is possible on the piano - even if it's not." I apply that on clarinet.
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-06-21 23:02
Quote:
I've only heard one pianist that actually did that, and it was Edwin Fischer.
Thanks for posting this recording! At the opening, I hear the middle C ringing more fully than the pitches below it. Perhaps he's depressing a bit the keys for the lower pitches and/or doing something with the pedal to create the effect? At any rate, it's very interesting, like a jolt of electricity, compared with the usual weightier approach to those chords.
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What did the composer intend with that deliberate marking choice? Other artists just play the chords more or less forte and let them naturally decay, then play the following notes more softly, as though the composer had written a decrescendo below a forte chord with the following notes piano instead of "fp".
Exactly right. How forte and how piano should one play this particular fp? How long should one hold the forte? Should it fade or immediately switch to p? These questions are the sorts of things we have to ask ourselves when we play a piece of music.
Too many musicians, however, grow up thinking forte means x, piano means y, staccato means z, and so on. (Perhaps the "correct answers" are drilled into us by band directors.) A piece of music, then, becomes like a piece of computer code, x, x, y, x, z, etc., we execute mindlessly. And, of course, whoever executes it most precisely wins the competition or audition.
But a fp in Beethoven means something differently than a fp in Stravinsky: there isn't a "correct answer." And even within the same piece of Beethoven, not every fp should be played the same way.
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Richter presses and relaxes the tempo throughout those initial bars, and I wish I had the musical vocabulary you mention to hook my thoughts about such things to.
The jargon isn't so important. As long as you can hear and feel, say, a deceptive cadence, then the term "deceptive cadence" is superfluous (though it's helpful when speaking or writing about music).
Just a quick anecdote: One of my classmates was a student of Itzhak Perlman. One day we were talking about phrasing, and he told me that Perlman didn't really know what a deceptive cadence was. He just played on instinct and used his ear. Everything he played, though, made complete musical sense (i.e. when there was a deceptive cadence in the music, he did a little something with the rhythm and tone color to show it). I suppose when you grow up with classical music, like Perlman did, you just grasp these things on an intuitive level.
I find that the way expression is commonly taught is geared towards the Perlmans of the world. Teachers say "play more musically," "sing more," "tell us a story with your playing," and so on. But if a student doesn't know how to sing or doesn't know how to translate the mental images a piece of music elicits into sound, these directives don't help. It's magical thinking. So in these instances (and, of course, it's most instances because there are very few Itzhak Perlmans), it's helpful to be able to lend a term to a musical phenomenon so that a student can at least learn music as a second language, so to speak.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-27 15:55
About Fischer's fp's, I **think** he plays the forte chord unsustained and quickly releases it, then immediately and soundlessly depresses the keys again to catch the chord's resonance and sustain the soft dynamic. I might have read that long ago, or it might be my non-pianist imagination. It sounds tricky or impossible to do.
I'm no Itzhak Perlman, but I've poured a lot of classical music into my ears over time (including Perlman playing!) Playing, I tend to automatically feel and express that idiom. However, definitions are good to have: they're like memory hooks to hang skeins of ideas on.
Vague directions suck. Sometimes you have to get down to naming specific muscle actions. Vocal teachers do that; it's hard to recall any clarinetist doing so. When in doubt, get analytical. However, the effect one ultimately projects can and often should be supereminent to analysis.
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-06-29 02:22
Quote:
About Fischer's fp's, I **think** he plays the forte chord unsustained and quickly releases it, then immediately and soundlessly depresses the keys again to catch the chord's resonance and sustain the soft dynamic. I might have read that long ago, or it might be my non-pianist imagination. It sounds tricky or impossible to do.
That might be it. Very interesting!
Speaking of musical markings and following the score, I was just thinking the other day about something I heard Robert Levin say in a class once. He told us his general guideline for performance practice is (paraphrasing): "A composer writes down only information that wouldn't be obvious to well-trained musicians of his or her own time." I think that kind of hits on what I was trying to say (though much more succinctly and elegantly!), and gets at why treating the score as the tablets of the covenant misses the mark.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-29 17:09
Levine's comment is great! After seeing it, how else would it be? Mozart didn't write out cadenzas because well-trained musicians of the time didn't need that information. Ditto much articulation and dynamic information. Maybe some composers assume, rightly or wrongly, that "well-trained" doesn't cover what they want, and so add more information.
That idea probably applies to all forms of expression. A creator assumes the interpreter and the audience will understand things. No need for legalese or the equivalent, which strives for unmistakable explicitness, but - words being ever redefinable - achieves at most opacity.
Maybe there's a step even further. in art, you want differing responses to appear and grow. Crossing and dotting all the t's and i's makes it . . . dull.
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The Clarinet Pages
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