 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Bubalooy
Date: 2010-12-28 20:15
I have posted on this topic once before, but, I received very few replies so I would like to try it again.
For most performers of through composed music, there is the belief in being true to what the composer intended. Usually, we also assume that he or she was capable of putting that on the page. Now I grant that some composers leave more decisions to the performer than others do, in terms of phrasing dynamics etc. This is not my question though. I guess it would be nice if I got to that.
How do we know if we can trust the editors and publishers? I have "Urtext" editions from different publishers of works that are very different from each other. It would be nice to track down the manuscripts and study them, but I think it is unreasonable to expect a majority of performers to do that. I do study the scores and try to make reasonable performance decisions, and it is not unusual, that those decisions are at odds with what is on the page. Sacrilege? I don't think so, since I can't be sure that the music in front of me is exactly what the composer had in mind.
What are your favorite publishers? Who do you trust?
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Author: chris moffatt
Date: 2010-12-28 22:40
"It would be nice to track down the manuscripts and study them, but I think it is unreasonable to expect a majority of performers to do that" Agreed - but isn't that what musicologists are for?
"How do we know if we can trust the editors and publishers?". We can't, any more than we can trust the editors & publishers of literary works. No way to know what changes might have been made or why. And don't forget copyists errors which also abound in pre-C20 works. Even from many a manuscript it's difficult if not impossible to know exactly what the composer had in mind simply because some of the information you'd like to have just isn't there.
But anyway, don't you also have to be concerned about what the music means to you? Or is there no place for interpretation? Are we just to slavishly copy whatever the conventional concept of a piece is? I think not, others may disagree. Incidentally have you searched the archives here? I know this topic has come up previously
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Author: beejay
Date: 2010-12-28 22:50
You are dealing with one of the most difficult problems in musicology. First, what is a score? This could be the original autograph, a copyists' version, an engraved or printed edition, an edition corrected by the composer for a particular performance, a collection of parts reassembled from various library collections, a reinterpretation of early music in modern notation, a manuscript completed by a different composer (Mahler's 10th), a pastiche, a parody, an interpretation by one composer by another's work (Bach's version of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater), a work written by one man but completed by orchestrators (Benjamin Britten's operas), etc. etc.
And even if you establish what you think is the original score, do you play it in exactly the way it was written or do you take into account historical evolutions in technique and taste? As an example, Roger Norrington interpreted the Beethoven symphonies using the composer's own tempi and other indicators. It doesn't sound like Von Karajan, for certain, and has been a subject of much criticicm and debate.
The word "urtext" tends to be a marketing gimmick. It is often quite meaningless. How, for example, can there be a urtext of the Mozart clarinet concerto when we have no idea of what the original looked like? Is the 19th century Mozart collection edited when Brahms was alive any less "ur" than the new edition with revised articulation? In any event, both are different from the earliest published editions. At best, "ur" means minimal editorial interference, but then you are going to have to work out articulation, tempi and interpretation for yourself, aren't you? Will this make your interpretation more "ur" than anyone else's.
Let's suppose by some miracle you found the original autograph of the clarinet concerto? Would it help in interpreting it?. Judging from other Mozart autographs that I have seen, I would imagine the concerto to have been quite sketchy. Mozart would have left it to his friend Anton Stadler to supply articulations and other interpretive nuances. Stadler was steeped in contemporary Viennese performance conventions and would have known how to bring the composition to life for audiences who also understood those conventions.
Thus, I think that good interpretation is not a question of reading from an urtext, but of understanding musical and cultural history. The score is but a starting point.
I suggest that the only way for you to tackle your own question is to study one or two scores in depth. This may not give you the answers you seek, but will give you a terrific insight into the complexity of writing, publishing and performing music -- not to speak of recording and marketing it, which brings up a whole new set of problems.
You might like to start with Mozart Kv622. There might still be in the archives of this site an article analyzing, if memory serves me right, eighteen different versions of the clarinet concerto, which would make a good starting point.
You say it is unreasonable to expect a majority of performers to track down manuscripts (that word again!). Why on earth not? I would expect a professional musician -- or, at least, certainly a conductor or a soloist -- to have deeply studied source material, since interpretation surely depends to some extent on understanding what is being read.
As for the composers' intent, how are we to know what it was (other than in program music) and does it matter if we don't? A.E.Houseman once complained that the public was interpreting one of his poems in a way that he had not intended, but was the public wrong? Stravinsky wrote that he was the only one capable of conducting his own music and achieving the result he intended. Does this invalidate versions by other conductors?
Any work of art becomes autonomous once it leaves the writer's hands. It achieves a life of its own. The way we listen to Beethoven symphonies today surely reflects the way that generations of conductors have interpreted them.
And even if we could strip all of this away, as Norrington attempted to do, we still would not have early 19th-century ears, and thus would be no closer to knowing whether we were hearing what the composer intended or not.
Even if knew what he intended, which, judging from the frenetic scratchings out and rewriting of some of Beethovens scores, written as well as printed, is by no means certain. Music is abstraction after all.
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Author: beejay
Date: 2010-12-28 22:53
Sorry, last para should read ...
Even if HE knew what he intended, which, judging from the frenetic scratchings out and rewriting of some of Beethovens scores, written as well as printed, is by no means certain. Music is abstraction after all.
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Author: sonicbang
Date: 2010-12-28 23:57
I have an Urtext Mozart concerto score from Peters. I have never heard that version...
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Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2010-12-29 03:22
Oddly, I just spent 2-hours with PBS' American Masters' bio on Glen Gould. He was so disrespectful of performance tradition that when he performed the Brahms 1st piano concerto with Bernstein that Lenny got up before the performance and explained to the audience that he was completely at odds with Gould's interpretation.
It appeared that Gould's performance emphasis was on his interpretation, not upon "knowing what the composer intended."
In playing a composition written explicitly for him, Gould challenged the composer: "You don't understand what you have written."
In another thread, we picked apart the interpretation of the Brahms Op. 120 sonatas. We seem to recognize that all the recorded performances find a different way to express --what, themselves? Brahms? Mulfhield (sp?)?
I think that interpretation --to whatever conventions are evoked-- is the province of the performer. Think how a held G5 dies, or evolves over its presentation, how a tenuto changes the character of a phrase, yet such "micro phrases" are NEVER marked in the performer's music.
My teacher just gave a remarkable performance of the Mozart Kv622; in my guided markup of the first movement, every measure has a couple of pencil marks that augment what was published. On entry, for instance, the "p" is penciled "mp." ... because that's where the audience meets you, and you don't want to be bashful.
Bob Phillips
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Author: Bob Bernardo
Date: 2010-12-29 05:38
Back in the days of Mozart only the notes were provided. Slurs, and so forth were added by the person(s) transcribing it. Thats actually why you may find several variations on one piece.
You made an interesting post.
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Author: Bubalooy
Date: 2010-12-29 23:10
Thank you all for responding. Beejay, I agree with everything you said. Still, surely some publishers, editors, etc. are more conscientious than others in what and how they present to their buyers. As for the musicologists, I love them, but there are more disagreements among them than there are between theologians. The discussions are often interesting, other times they get hung up on who cares type of points.
I tend to like Peters editions of Mozart. Are some publishers better than others for various artists Peters for Mozart, Henle for Brahms?
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Author: mrn
Date: 2010-12-31 01:15
Bob Phillips wrote:
Quote:
Oddly, I just spent 2-hours with PBS' American Masters' bio on Glen Gould. He was so disrespectful of performance tradition that when he performed the Brahms 1st piano concerto with Bernstein that Lenny got up before the performance and explained to the audience that he was completely at odds with Gould's interpretation.
It appeared that Gould's performance emphasis was on his interpretation, not upon "knowing what the composer intended."
I think it's worth noting that, at least from what I've read/seen, it appears that Gould really thought of himself more as a composer than as a performer.
While many of his performances may have had very little resemblance to the performance practices of the composers' era(s)--and thus were largely divorced from the pieces' historical context--the performances of Gould that I have heard tend to make a lot of musical sense when heard in their own independent context. That is to say that Gould's interpretations were often unashamedly transformative in nature, but still musically coherent in themselves--recomposed by Gould, as it were.
Thus Gould's modus operandi was still a *music-centric* or *composer-centric* process, as opposed to a *performance-centric* one. It's just that in doing so, he assumed much more of the composer's role than most of us would be comfortable doing. Gould found order and meaning in the music he played in places most of us (including, perhaps, even the composers themselves) would not think to look. That's why he was a great musician, despite the eccentricities of his interpretations.
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Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2010-12-31 15:52
The first of the links in my previous post includes Gould as the last of the players in the comparison set.
I spent quite a bit of time listening to various youTube cellists playing the first Bach Cello Suite yesterday and found HUGE differences between the way the great players of today and yesterday perform the work.
Let the record show that my wife had to come to my aid with kleenex when I encountered:
< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUHO7wzVjXg&feature=related>
Bob Phillips
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Author: mrn
Date: 2010-12-31 18:38
Quote:
... and a claim that under 1% of the music belongs to the composer
I didn't read her remark that way. What I understood her to say was that the written notation only captures about 1% of the music--that print is an imperfect medium for recording musical ideas.
I interpret that to mean that we as performers have to read "between the lines" to get at the composer's underlying ideas. It doesn't mean that the music doesn't belong mostly to the composer--it just means that the performer has to try to come to a meeting of the minds with the composer as best he/she can by focusing not only on what is notated, but what it really *means* in a more general musical sense. Music notation doesn't really capture musical meaning--it requires a certain level of perception on the part of a performer or listener to grasp it.
The other thing I noticed about the context of her remark was that it came up in a discussion of various *editions* of a work. So in that sense, she wasn't really talking about the work of the composer, but that of the editors, who essentially replace imperfect notation with more imperfect notation.
More specifically, the piano student in the clip blamed the editor for the bland way in which he was playing the music, because he was just playing what was written. Ms. Pires's response to that was basically to pay more attention to what the music itself (that is, the audible idea, as opposed to the written notation) was trying to say, rather than blindly regurgitate the written notation devoid of the musical context it was written in and intended to suggest.
Note that she did indicate to the student that there *was* a more correct way to play the music. She did not simply tell the student to do whatever he felt like. So I don't really think she would say that the performer "owns" 99% of the music and the composer only 1%. I think the idea she was trying to get across was that the actual music the composer created exists outside of the musical notation and that you have to think about the music at a deeper level than the notation provides in order to give a fully meaningful performance of it.
Getting back to the topic of the thread, what a good Urtext edition does is limit the notation to that which was important enough to the composer to include, so that you aren't confused into believing that marks added by an editor are part of the composer's original idea (or, even worse, an IMPORTANT part of the original idea). Of course, that's somewhat hard to do in the case of a work like Mozart's K622, where there is no complete manuscript to work from, but it's still possible to make a reasonable guess based on little bit of manuscript we do have, the style of the time, and what we know of the composer's other works (where we do have manuscripts)--that is, as long as the editors of the "Urtext" edition stay reasonably true to the principle of "less is more."
Post Edited (2010-12-31 18:49)
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2010-12-31 19:23
As I put together a replacement for this and other associated sites I am re-reading some of the articles that I've had over the years. One that shows the complexities of manuscripts is http://www1.woodwind.org/articles/repertoire-2/nielsen-concerto---performance-notes.html - three manuscripts of Carl Nielsen's Koncert For Klarinet Og Orkester, Opus 57. Eric Nelson worked on this Concerto with Tage Scharff, Professor of Clarinet at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen, Denmark, and former pupil of Aage Oxenvad. He did a comparison of the published sersion with 3 manuscripts in the Danish Royal Library: the earliest full score, in pencil, Oxenvad's solo part in ink, with Oxenvad's own performance notes and markings, and with the manuscript prepared for the engraver.
Interesting stuff ...
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