 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2006-04-05 21:47
I'd like to tell the story of my particular relationship to this piece, to do with how I first came to play it. It's a story that might be instructive (or not:-)
A very important part of my musical development was that I had a pianist friend at school; and he used to come round to my house for us to read through the clarinet repertoire. We played first the simpler pieces: Finzi Bagatelles, Arnold Sonata and so on. But we eventually progressed to, for example, the Ireland Fantasy Sonata, and even had a shot at the Reger Sonatas.
We also 'discovered', and played in a concert, the Komarowsky concerto, all quite independent of my formal lessons.
But anyway, because we were a duo, we were asked, as a duo, to play an item in a little show to be put on at the school; and I thought the last movement of the Weber Gran Duo (another of our 'discoveries':-) would work well. So I suggested that.
Then, while I was practising it, I thought to myself, I should have a lesson on this from my teacher. (He'd never heard me play it, you see.)
But then I thought -- and I remember the moment very well, and even the decoration of the room at home I was in, and the wooden music stand, and the light of the early evening, and so on -- I thought, "Actually, I don't have to have a lesson, because this is between Weber and me."
And that felt very dangerous, but somehow right. (It's informed my attitude to music ever since.)
Of course, I didn't know at the time that there was another layer between me and Weber, namely the editor of the edition I was playing.
But I do now -- and in case you haven't noticed, Mark has just put up in another thread a pdf file of a transcription of the clarinet part as it appears in Weber's manuscript.
Tony
Post Edited (2006-04-05 21:51)
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Author: cigleris
Date: 2006-04-05 23:41
Tony I remember my first encounter with the Gran Duo.
Was at school and at the time just wanted to show off alot, saw the piece in the music shop in Plymouth town centre and thought great. Had a bash at school and the clarinet teacher (lovely Mrs Blake who really taught me the appreciation of what I was trying to play), who then said that's very good but how about trying this. She had put the Brahms F minor infront of me and told me to go away and learn that, which as a 14 year old I wasn't really happy about. I did as she said and fell in love with it, came back the next week and we played it through to she said, you have really matured and can now stop trying to show off. I then spent the next few weeks ingrossed in Brahms, symphonies, concertos etc.
Since then i haven't touched the Gran Duo apart from one recital many years ago, and have favoured the larger clarinet works.
Hope I didn't bore you with my story.
Peter Cigleris
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2006-04-06 00:23
cigleris wrote:
>> Hope I didn't bore you with my story.>>
Yes, you did.
Tony
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Author: Brenda
Date: 2006-04-06 02:11
This was a piece that I'd heard on a Cleveland, Ohio radio station all those years ago when I was still in high school, fell in love with the Rondo, and bought the music "just in case" someday I'd get to it. Well now that I know more about clarinet repertoire I realize it's part of the clarinet syllabus for the Royal Conservatory. Not a bad buy! Too bad it's not played more on classical stations, coming to think of it.
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Author: Danny Boy
Date: 2006-04-06 11:13
I remember the first performance I gave of a piece that I 'hadn't had a lesson on' and it scared me to death...what if I had missed something super important or had learned a wrong note without realising it??
Funnily enough, and the reason for mentioning it was that it was the Weber Gran Duo. I'd learned the 2nd and 3rd movement with a past teacher and decided to learn the whole work.
I went on to play it in my final at college, and am currently getting it ready again for recitals and competitions.
<wanders off to check Mark's thread...>
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2006-04-06 14:53
I have a very strong memory of the first substantial piece I learned without a lesson. My piano teacher assigned me Schoenberg's Ten for the second time. I hated them violently the first time, but a couple of years later, he decided I'd matured enough to appreciate them. Well, no. I hated them even more violently the second time. I was not practicing those again. No way. Since my piano teacher didn't approve of Bach on the piano, I lied to my mother about my new assignment. How convenient that she already owned Bach's Italian Concerto! We didn't have to go out and buy the music!--I drew the line at my lies costing my parents money, you see.
(I wish I'd known then what I know now: the German government meticulously catalogued everything Bach owned at the time of his death. That catalogue has been published. He owned a fortepiano. Even if I'd known, though, I'm not sure I would have had the nerve to argue with the teacher, who found challenges so alarming that he tended to burst into tears. N. b. for teachers: If you want your students to just shut up and do as they're told, weeping works much better than screaming.)
The teacher didn't assign me the challenging Shoenberg pieces for the recital, fortunately. I'd been clunking my way through them so horribly at lessons that I probably convinced him I was the stupidest student he'd ever had. He assigned me to play some little piece of nothing--I can't even remember for certain what it was, although it may have been a moronic, so-called teaching piece called "Across the Desert" that I think he intended as punishment. Whatever it was, I remember thinking that a ten-year-old could have sight-read it. Meanwhile, I learned Bach's Italian Concerto. I'd show him! I'd show those superior, favorite students of his! I'd show them all! I'd put the little piece of nothing on the rack, announce it and then play the Bach instead, from memory. I imagined myself playing like Wanda Landowska, of course.
What I really did at the recital was put the little piece of nothing I hadn't practiced on the rack, announce it, sit there frozen for a few miserable seconds and then chicken out and play it, in all its nothingness, atrociously.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2006-04-06 15:48
Well, I was about to play the GD Concertant. I thought I had it down, when my teacher offered to go over it with me. I've "studied" this piece by incessant listening to recorded performances
FIE! He saw so much more in there than I'd found. Same with Kv622.
HAH, I'll show him; I'm really, really "getting" Crusell #2, second movement.
Good on all of you with the musicianship to find your own way throug the jungles of interpretation. When I can play well enough to get the clarinet out of the way, maybe I can learn to interpret on my own. Meanwhile, I need all the help I can get.
Bob Phillips
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Author: D Dow
Date: 2006-04-06 17:40
At the time of Bach's death there was no German government...I thought he lived in what was then Prussia.
David Dow
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Author: Wayne Thompson
Date: 2006-04-06 19:03
Tony, your story says to me that we must take responsibility for our performances. Teachers presumably know more than we do, and are necessary tools for us, but they can not own what we do. I'm not professional, and admittedly as a young man I looked too hard for teachers that would teach me everything, in everything I did. As a fifty year old, I took up clarinet again and took some lessons with Frank Renk, of the San Diego Symphony. (And it goes without saying, that I have much, much to learn from lessons with a pro.) I realized as he was giving me ideas about the Stamitz I was working on, that I had all this knowledge available already, in listening experience, in the written page, in recordings, in books and innumerable other resources.
A few months ago I prepared by myself part of the Weber 1st concerto for a master class with Margaret Thornhill. In the class I was given new important ideas and reminded of things I already knew, but I liked that my starting point was Weber’s written notes only. I will get more lessons, and I will have more adventures like I had at with Margaret, but I love the feeling of being an adult with a composer's piece of music in front of me and having the personal responsibility of making it come to life.
Our community orchestra is performing Scheherazade. As 2nd clarinet, those wonderful rhythmic arpeggios in the first movement are a challenge for me to play well and to fit under the solo violin and to fit against the different pizzicato rhythm of the celli. I am having a great time with the score and my metronome and Mr. Kosakov trying to make this music happen. Mine is a very simple example, I know, but I appreciate the importance to you of how you realized your relationship to Weber.
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Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2006-04-06 23:10
I mentioned here my impressions of attending a bassoon master class (Bassoonarama at Eastern Washington University).
Three spectacularly competent players showed up --products of great teachers. Each recieved significant insights from the master's class teacher that dramatically improved their playing of the pieces they brought to the class.
I was blown away, and then had the opportunity to talk to the master class students' teachers. I thought that they would be embarrassed to have had their students so heavily and importantly "evolved" in the master's class. NOT so; these excellent musician/teachers were pleased at the insights and the exposure recieved by their students.
I think that's all just great. I'd have contentedly listened to all of these players before they were "reformed" by the class; and I'd just as contentedly listen to them again --even more so knowing what insights they'd been given.
Bob Phillips
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2006-04-07 16:58
>>At the time of Bach's death there was no German government...I thought he lived in what was then Prussia.
>>
It's true that there was no German government as such in the 18th century, but the people who ran the government where Bach died and who catalogued Bach's estate were Germans. What is now Germany was divided into many dukedoms, provinces, city-states, etc. that all had independent names, but they did recongize a shared ethnic identity as Germans by then. Bach was born in Eisenach, a town in Thuringia, for instance. Bach did die in Prussia, as you say. "Prussia," a collective term that's now somewhat obsolete, refers to a large area (made up of many of these former small governmental fiefdoms) that's become modern-day northern Germany and southern Poland. However, the majority of musical scholars who write about Bach today do refer collectively to all of those places then governed by people who were Germans as Germany and to Bach as a German composer.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: Bassie
Date: 2006-04-07 18:34
This is all very deep. The turning of a score into music is not simply a matter of playing the dots. It took me a long, long time to realise this. Probably why I'm not a professional.
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Author: Wayne Thompson
Date: 2006-04-08 01:06
Bassie,
I hope neither I nor anyone else was suggesting playing music is just playing the dots.
Tony Pay described some of his process on the Klarinet List:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/Klarinet/2005/08/000484.txt
It was this process I thought of when Tony initiated this thread. We non professionals can still consider these sorts of steps and do our best.
Here's two paragraphs from this post of Tony's:
"The most important thing is, I study the score, and I look at the expressive instructions that the composer writes. If it is not a contemporary piece, I try to find out something of what the composer might have meant by the notation of that score, and by the expressive instructions.
"I investigate how my part is embedded in the score. If my part is a solo part, I ask what are its expressive implications, and how the accompaniment supports or contradicts that expression. I have many choices of what that expression might be, you see, because I can play a passage happily, sadly, reflectively, passionately, aggressively... If my part is not a solo one, I ask how my part contributes to the possible expressive qualities of the music that contains it. I may ask whether my part is something like an active 'arm', or more like a supportive 'leg'."
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Author: Bassie
Date: 2006-04-08 22:25
Wayne,
No-one here has suggested that playing music is just playing the dots! Sorry if I implied anything else.
I was in a bit of a hurry last night. What I was trying to say boils down to this: does a score contain all that's necessary to play a piece? Maybe yes and maybe no. Reading a score requires great skill and understanding. What do the notes actually mean, in context? This takes time to learn. For me, it only came when I took up singing late in my career. I do not have perfect pitch, so I can't just see a 'C' and sing a 'C'. So the only way I can find my way around a piece is to actually understand where the composer is taking it. On clarinet, it's possible to 'fudge' matters and finger the notes without actually knowing why they're there. I think this actually hampered my musical development. Or maybe it's just a matter of 'growing up'.
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2006-04-08 22:44
Bassie wrote (with my changes in italics to say the same thing about books):
> What I was trying to say
> boils down to this: does a book contain all that's necessary
> to understand its meaning? Maybe yes and maybe no.
I would say yes, by definition. It is what it is ... just like the composer's score. No more, no less.
> Reading a book
> requires great skill and understanding. What do the words
> actually mean, in context? This takes time to learn.
Agreed. The more you practice X, the better you become at discerning the levels; great authors and great composers have this in common. There are "throw-away" (or as I call them "airplane") novels, which are wonderful in the context of reading for fun (John Grisham, for instance), and then there are those that you work on again and again, learning more each time you read them (Shakespeare, Conrad).
Both great books and great music have something very much in common - their cadence. The rhythm, the sounds, the falling of each phrase reinforcing the last or nudging (or forcing!) us to a new direction in thought. I'd struggled through the Canterbury Tales long ago, but recently decided to give it a try again with an audio book. Listening to it spoken as it was written is a revelation! It doesn't take all that long to get used to the "foreign" sounds and vocabulary, whereby you start hearing the stories as they are meant to sound, and start to understand why this is one of the "great books". So it is in music ...
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2006-04-09 00:26
The book makes a fine analogy, if we're talking about the right kind of book: a script. A music score for more than one instrument is a dialogue. It isn't enough to study as much as we can understand of the composer's intention. We also have to take into account the other musicians' intentions, not only in study but during the performance itself (some people rush and increase their volume when they're nervous, etc.), the same as we have to stay alert to what other actors do onstage. In a scene between four characters having a conversation, we've got to agree on how far apart we stand and how loudly we talk to each other. If one of us declaims to the back rafters while the others huddle and stage-whisper, then either we confuse the audience or we're working on a subtext about how the character who's yelling has no social skills! Similarly, I can decide all I want to, in private, about the phrasing and the dynamics of a piece of music, but if the conductor or other members of an ensemble don't agree with me, then I'm not a sensitive interpreter at all--as far as the audience can tell, I'm just an oddball with stone ears.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2006-04-09 01:00
Lelia Loban wrote:
> The book makes a fine analogy, if we're talking about the right
> kind of book: a script.
Yes, you're right - a novel is self-contained, while a script requires actors, their interpretation, a producer, a director, a cameraman, etc., all who have creative input (both contructive and destructive) into the final production. It's a much better analogy than a novel.
What I've been trying to do is to de-mystify scores, and put it into terms that are more familiar. The clarinet part provided by Tony is the original actor's part, and any good actor needs to know the setting(s) the part takes place in and the dialogue they're supposed to be having with the other actors. After all, we're telling a story! If someone else has re-written the part, then we don't know what the script writer was trying to tell us originally.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2006-04-09 10:00
Yes, this is a nice analogy. The only thing I'd want to add is that sometimes, in music, a player doesn't even get to be an actor -- you're rather a part of the scenery. In fact, a difficulty some instrumentalists have is that they can't stop being a person, even if 'not being a person' is exactly what's required.
This is of course obscured by much traditional teaching, which -- for wholly understandable reasons -- constantly insists on the student playing in what is described as a 'feeling' way. But, if you're a young player, you can have just as much fun pretending to be a bicycle as you can pretending to be a national hero, I say.
Tony
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2006-04-09 11:35
>>But, if you're a young player, you can have just as much fun pretending to be a bicycle as you can pretending to be a national hero, I say.
>>
If you're an old player, too! In January, I observed a fine example of musical acting in a master class, taught by Kenneth Tse at the International Saxophone Symposium, at George Mason U. in Fairfax, Virginia. The student (chosen by audition) had been studying a tenor sax piece by Stockhausen, with a different teacher. This piece has no melody and incorporates dance and mime. It requires the musician to choose physical locations for pitches along the scale, and to move into those locations using body language specific for the duration or other qualities of each note. Before attending this master class, I regarded such music as gimmicky and not likely to survive (composer desperate to produce something unique at a time when mainstream music critics made a big production of sneering at anything "derivative"), but Tse and this highly skilled student gave me a new appreciation.
The student and his teacher had chosen an abrupt, cubist style of movement. I thought it worked beautifully, because the young man (a college senior, I think) had a dancer's understanding of movement and spatial location and he also had an unusual, interesting face and a fine ability to keep it completely expressionless. I hope I'm not making him sound repellant, because although he did make himself look inhuman, the effect was that of a marionette, controlled by something outside himself: He stopped being a young man and became an abstraction of the music score.
Kenneth Tse asked him to try something different, by relocating some of his notes to more exaggeratedly high and low and left and right points and by swooping into them with a fluid movement instead of the abrupt stops and starts. Tse wanted him to keep moving. The student was tall enough and strong enough to follow this direction successfully. That interpretation also worked well. It made the music communicate quite differently from the cubist style. (I'd have liked to see and hear a combination: Tse's recommendation of extreme location of the notes, but reached with the cubist style of movement. ) I don't know whether Stockhausen wrote anything of this type for clarinet, but I think such music might work well to help students get out of themselves and into the score, literally--and such a score would be easier to perform on clarinet than on the larger, heavier tenor sax.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
Post Edited (2006-04-09 11:38)
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2006-04-09 22:32
Lelia Loban wrote:
>> I don't know whether Stockhausen wrote anything of this type for clarinet, but I think such music might work well to help students get out of themselves and into the score, literally...>>
Well, he did: there are two big solo pieces called Harlekin and Der kleine Harlekin; and quite probably, the piece you heard and saw was another such piece, In Freundschaft, which has been arranged for other instruments including the saxophone. (But I may be wrong. Perhaps you heard another piece of that nature for the saxophone.)
What I was on about, however, was something much closer to home. In the orchestral repertoire, we are only rarely cast as individual persons; and even in the Mozart Concerto, there are moments where it's best not to be 'soloist'.
So, for example, the ninth to the twelfth bars of the solo part of that piece are best played admittedly personally, but with a decorative and deferential feel; bars 134 to 140 of the same movement are certainly more 'bicycle' than 'person', whilst bars 77 to 80 of the last movement constitute 'legs' to the flute and violins.
And there are many similar examples -- especially in the Brahms works.
Tony
Post Edited (2006-04-09 22:33)
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2006-04-09 22:34
Lelia -
Your instincts are right. Stockhausen has written many pieces for the remarkable basset horn player and dancer Suzanne Stephens, and I suspect that what was played at the saxophone workshop was one of them.
Ken Shaw
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Author: ned
Date: 2006-04-10 08:21
''cigleris wrote:>> Hope I didn't bore you with my story.>>Yes, you did.''
So....what's this comment meant to indicate?
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2006-04-10 14:57
Thanks for the information about Stockhausen scores. I hope I can find a DVD of someone playing this type of music.
Tony Pay wrote,
>>What I was on about, however, was something much closer to home. In the orchestral repertoire, we are only rarely cast as individual persons; and even in the Mozart Concerto, there are moments where it's best not to be 'soloist'.
<<
Yes, I understand that. I didn't explain clearly enough: I think a kinesthetic piece such as that one by Stockhausen might make a fine teaching tool to help give a student the experience of climbing out of himself/herself: "I'm not playing the music. The music is playing me." I think that experience, even in solo practice at home, might help someone understand, on a physical level, what it's like to assimilate into the Borg--er, I mean, assimilate into an ensemble. "I am the clarinet. We are the orchestra."
I can't remember the context any more, but I saw a televised orchestra rehearsal in which the conductor tapped on his stand and said, "That sfortzando isn't a love-pat. It's a punch in the gut." Repeating the phrase, the orchestra gave that sfortzando a mighty wallop. Think of ballet, too--not jsut "story ballet," but abstract ballet. It's the physical manifestation of music. I think we tend to repress it when we practice, because we can't go drawing attention to ourselves with a lot of goofy-looking swooping and swooning, but we can learn to *think* physically and to the extent that we can do that--become a conduit of the music (from the inside) instead of playing it (from the outside)--I think we play better.
Curious linguistic phenomenon: Ever noticed how many Juilliard graduates have that habit of referring to themselves as their instruments?
"What do you play?"
"I'm first clarinet with the Gooberville Philharmonic."
To some extent, that's just the normal tendency to use as few syllables as possible: clarinet instead of clarinetist. But I think there's more to it than that; and I don't think it's just an affectation, either. Juilliard somehow instills a sense of identification with the instrument. I don't notice that pattern of speech so much with graduates of Curtis or other music schools.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2006-04-10 16:24
Stockhausen's "Harlekin" puts the clarinetist in a particolored costume and requires expert dancing as well as playing. Suzanne Stephens of course performs it, http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco7/stockhausen/25.html, and there's a CD, though it would present only half the performance without the costume and dancing. Laura Flax has done sensational performances in New York.
Lelia -
Speaking of a love pats and a punch in the gut, I was at a college bnd rehearsal of Stravinsky's "Circus Polka (For a Young Elephant)." The piece depicts a baby elephant, constantly falling down, and is full of "wrong notes." The players didn't like it, and they played lackadaisically.
The conductor said, "You're playing all those wrong notes as if they were wrong notes -- 'I'm playing the wrong notes, but don't blame me. It's what that dumb Stravinsky wrote.' NO! Its about an elephant falling down splat. Your attitude should be 'I'm playing the wrong notes! SPFLTT'" (Bronx cheer).
The band loved it, and their playing was transformed into a minor riot.
Ken Shaw
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Author: cigleris
Date: 2006-04-10 23:58
Ned, it's either Tony having a joke, or that my story from when i was at school did in fact make him bored
Peter Cigleris
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