 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Matt74
Date: 2016-12-12 22:58
I'm responding the thread "Baroque Music" by Sarah C and the responses. I taught myself recorder about 15 years ago, although I did so rather naively. I played an unsuccessful audition at Longy, and later had a lesson with the professor at Peabody. In HS and College I spent a lot of time with flute. However, when I was young I didn't get a very good musical education properly speaking.
The question Sarah asked was about the difference in approach between recorder and modern clarinet, which lead to a discussion about modern and older instruments generally.
Do you all think that modern instruments are louder and more powerful than classical and baroque instruments, generally speaking? How do you understand that difference? (I don't mean silly comparisons like "His Majestie's Bagpipes, Cornetts, and Sakbutts of the Fyrst Hylande Dragoons" vs. "Mrs. Teasdale's Preschool Flute Choir and Cookie Club".)
Personally, I have often wondered why everything has to be so !%&@ loud. I go to the tiny, quiet, coffee shop and the dude singing folk music with a big metal stringed guitar, sitting in front of a bay window, on a platform, above a tile floor, between brick walls, is double miked! My R13 has a nice sound but it wears me out. My saxophone (Selmer SA80II) is powerful but I can't stand it. Both of them, physically, impel me produce a very forceful sound, because they require considerable effort to make a full sound. "Furioso" comes more naturally than "cantabile". This is not the case with recorder.
How do you think this has changed our approach to music?
- Matthew Simington
Post Edited (2016-12-14 11:26)
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Author: Caroline Smale
Date: 2016-12-13 01:48
Modern instruments are VERY much more powerful than Baroque.
I think main reason is that most early music was performed in fairly intimate settings, wheereas the modern player is often required to produce sound that will penetrate a 2/3000 seater hall, or god forbid a 10,000 seater stadium.
So even the violins made many centuries ago have all had to be "modernised" with longer necks and stronger bass bars in order to keep up with the brass and woodwind volumes.
It is much harder to be "delicate" when playing modern instruments but I think the very best artists today can, and do, tame their instruments to perform beautifully in smaller chamber works
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Author: brycon
Date: 2016-12-13 02:13
Quote:
Modern instruments are VERY much more powerful than Baroque.
Yep. I also feel as though you can't push as much on the older clarinets; the type of sostenuto playing common in contemporary American orchestras isn't really possible (or isn't really comfortable, at least) on classical instruments.
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Author: Matt74
Date: 2016-12-13 05:09
Can you give me an example of "contemporary sostenuto" playing? If a Youtube video will work...
- Matthew Simington
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Author: Matt74
Date: 2016-12-13 05:31
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Norman, I think that's right about the huge concert halls - just thinking of that picture of King Frederick playing with Quantz. Above are Frederick, Mozart, and Haydn. I think it's unfortunate that we don't have much live music anymore, and if we do it has to be in a huge concert hall. Chamber performances, like at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston are very popular. They have frequent "performances" at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and it's very nice.
- Matthew Simington
Post Edited (2016-12-13 05:35)
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Author: brycon
Date: 2016-12-13 05:59
Quote:
Can you give me an example of "contemporary sostenuto" playing? If a Youtube video will work...
I just mean blowing through a bar so that beat four leads into beat one (Tabuteau famously taught this style). Listen to most any mid to late 20th century American orchestral clarinetists--Robert Marcellus playing Mozart's Concerto for example.
For me, the classical clarinet encourages a slight decrescendo on held notes as well as groups of notes under a single slur/phrase marking (which seems to be the consensus approach to phrasing in general among historically-informed musicians). On the first entrance of the Mozart, for instance, Marcellus crescendos into the second measure; this phrasing would be more difficult on the old instrument (again, for me--perhaps others have a different experience).
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Author: Matt74
Date: 2016-12-13 08:09
Does Schiffrin do "Sostenuto Americano"?
Is this what you mean by "Classical" (Neidich)?: https://youtu.be/T6moQEPJo2c
Does the orchestra do the classical style here? https://youtu.be/SoqgyjdPdts
(I'm not sure about Sabine herself - maybe "sostenetto"? - I made that up.)
I take it Heinz Holliger does not do "Sostenuto Americano".
Sounds more like dancing. It's more accented and metred, with a "lilt". More lively. I think Tony Pay was talking about this one time. I've always preferred this sound.
A while ago I was playing some Ferling tunes (from the Oboe/Saxophone book). It seemed to me that some of them were supposed to be danceable, or dance-like, but I wasn't taught to play them that way.
- Matthew Simington
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Author: Wes
Date: 2016-12-13 09:40
The saxophone was mentioned as being so loud. However, when I hear a concert with five saxophones playing in an auditorium, I feel that they are often not loud enough and certainly do not compete with amplified instruments, which can be too loud.
The R13 clarinets can certainly sound too strong to players in the regular orchestra, but that same sound would be just fine in many halls.
Of course, those baroque and early instruments are very much softer than modern instruments which is one reason why they are not used these days so much.
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Author: Matt74
Date: 2016-12-13 10:35
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I agree about the saxophones in the jazz band, but I think the problem is not the saxophones. Five saxophones are plenty loud. The amplifiers have knobs. Some brass players are trying to burst a blood vessel. Drums can be played with dynamics.
IMO amplification is a huge problem. Literally speaking, when someone is miked you don't hear them at all. You hear what is coming out of the speaker. It looses the warmth and intimacy of a real instrument. It may seem necessary in some halls, but to my knowledge orchestras don't use it and you can still hear the flute over the whole orchestra all the way in the back.
Above are some pictures of Jazz bands. I tried to pick real conditions of live performances. In the old photos there is like one or two mikes on stage, mostly for vocalists. In the more recent ones even the drums and trumpets are miked. (They may be recording...but they don't mike every single chair in orchestra recordings do they?) The old bands used to have clarinets and solos and everybody could hear, even with people dancing and talking and stuff. Glenn Miller is playing outside. Bands today just don't get that prewar sound. Everybody sounds like Phil Woods and Michael Brecker. I admire both immensely, but Harry Carney (Ellington's Bari) had a sound, and I miss the clarinets. Not to mention Young, Webster, Hodges, et al.
The point isn't to rant about it though. It seems to me that we lost something in the way we play music, especially classical, and I wanted to hear thoughts about that.
- Matthew Simington
Post Edited (2016-12-13 11:33)
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2016-12-13 23:07
Although it may be true for some players and setups, my own experience is that the sort of clarinet that you're playing doesn't determine your attitude to phrasing. Early clarinets have a more uneven response; but you're still confronted by the fact that sometimes the music requires a 'bad' note on the instrument to sound as a 'good' note, and vice-versa.
What's true for string players is that it's difficult to play sostenuto on an early bow. Indeed, the design of the bow changed in order to make sostenuto more tractable:
https://vimeo.com/42367809
Of course, the more 'spoken' style of the early bows doubtless influenced the wind players who worked with string players who used them.
Matthew said of the 'spoken' style:Quote:
It's more accented and metred, with a "lilt". More lively. I think Tony Pay was talking about this one time. You could say that:-) I have spent a great deal of time on this subject here, over a period of nearly 20 years now. Here are some early efforts:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/lookup.php/Klarinet/1998/10/000412.txt
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/lookup.php/Klarinet/1998/10/000421.txt
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/lookup.php/Klarinet/1998/10/000437.txt
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/lookup.php/Klarinet/1998/10/000440.txt
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/lookup.php/Klarinet/1998/10/000447.txt
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/lookup.php/Klarinet/1998/10/000474.txt
...and as I've said before, you can follow other people's contributions to the threads involved by truncating the url to:
http://test.woodwind.org/Databases/lookup.php/Klarinet/1998/10/
...and scrolling down to the relevant posts.
However, a very helpful discussion, with a particularly thoughtful contribution by Jason, is here, in a thread devoted to a chamber music masterclass by Menahem Pressler. In the link to the class you see the ideas embodied, though they are never made fully explicit:
http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=362680&t=362674
There is more, to do with how the efforts of Tabuteau, Bonade and others have buried understanding of these issues in baroque and classical music, available via the Search function.
Tony
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Author: Matt74
Date: 2016-12-14 11:25
Thank you very much. I like what you said about music and speech. About a week ago I was listening to Horowitz's 1951 Carnegie Hall Recital (I almost never listen to piano). I noticed how much his playing sounded like someone conversing - almost like you were half asleep and hearing someone talking in the next room.
I only found a couple snippets of the Pressler video, but The Leister video was great!
When you quit playing for twenty years, after being quite serious (if not terribly accomplished), it is a very strange experience. I remember a lot of emphasis on connecting notes and forward motion, but I now remember becoming aware of the importance of beginnings and endings, which the present discussion has brought to mind.
I've been very over-focused in my efforts to fill the horn. The video of the bowing helped by giving me a sound to think about.
Karl Leister mentioned nature and the leaves and spiritual things, children, heaven. Today we are tempted impose our will on everything, rather than reflect beauty. I have definitely been trying to impose my will on my clarinet. It hasn't been working.
- Matthew Simington
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