Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2008-10-14 03:04
Nitai wrote:
>> What I meant (sorry if it wasn't clear) is that someone who is going to change a composed piece should possibly ask themselves why they are even going to play it. >>
I suppose that it didn't occur to Alex -- for example -- that he was CHANGING the Copland. He thought that he was doing the job of INTERPRETING it.
But that sort of confusion is quite common. It's usually applied to earlier music, though; modern composers like Copland are assumed for some reason to have written 'what they wanted' more than someone like Schumann, say, who is fair game for the free-fantasist.
(I say Schumann because I once heard an execrable performance of the Fantasiestucke by the 'cellist Natalia Gutman, who went on to give a wonderful account of the Britten sonata. She thought that Britten knew what he wanted, and presumably Schumann, not. She afterwards said, "Do you STILL prefer it on the clarinet?" to a Russian student of mine she knew who was at the concert with me -- to which I wanted to reply that she wasn't entitled to use the word 'it' in her question, because she hadn't played IT, having ignored all Schumann's dynamics, phrasing and tempo indications. But I didn't.)
So I agree with you. And indeed, if I find that I can't see my way to have a piece 'work' without imposing something on it that has no justification in the text itself -- so that I'm just using the text as a sort of 'note-quarry' for my own devices -- I generally try not to play the piece.
Since we're being 'philosophical':-) here's an unusual example of misrepresenting a piece because of marketing considerations: I was once asked to play what used to be called 'The Wagner Adagio' in a chamber music programme. So I said that of course we would play it, but that it had recently been discovered to be, not by Wagner, but by Heinrich Baermann (a movement from his septet for clarinet, strings and two obbligato horns) and should therefore appear in the programme as by Baermann, its true author. The director of our chamber ensemble reported this to the concert promoter who came back saying that no, she wanted the Wagner Adagio, which was how it had to appear on the programme. So I refused to play it under those conditions.
Something like the Cage solo clarinet sonata is (perhaps) different. Here there are no contextual instructions, like dynamics or phrasing. It's all just note-rhythm content, apart from a tempo instruction at the beginning of each of the movements. So you have to do SOMETHING. And what I've often done is played the movements in between the movements of something else -- once a Machaut mass, and once more recently between, and occasionally during, the movements of the Saint-Saens sonata. That gives some musical leverage for decisions about how to play the notes, because you have a context to work with and against.
So you see that I'm not that much of a purist about composers' intentions -- just a purist about being HONEST when we are making free with them, and not pretending that somehow we are justified in doing what we do by the slippery notion of 'interpretation'.
I'm very glad, by the way, that Brian, Mike and perhaps Alex, are finding ways to play the Copland without messing about with it. And surely, that's what we should always BEGIN with, rather than with other people's recorded messes -- whoever they are.
Tony
Post Edited (2008-10-14 07:33)
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