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Re: Idolizing the past

Author: brycon
Date: 2020-11-02 22:36

Quote:

Why do clarinet players (and even musicians in general) idolize past players so much? Wouldn't it be more useful to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of old famous artists in order to learn from their playing? Respecting their artistry and honoring their memory is of course essential, however I hazard a guess that by viewing them through rose-tinted glasses we fail to differentiate the good from the bad and therefore do not remember them for the actual qualities of their playing that stood out as exceptional.

There's certainly a human tendency toward nostalgia, the culture and politics of one's youth. Here in the U.S., of course, large swaths of people hope for a return to the 1950s despite the era being wretched for many others. And less insidiously, my dad prefers 60s rock to whatever's current in pop music, I prefer the 96 Bulls to the 2016 Warriors, and so on.

Our desire to retreat into the past is a major theme throughout all art forms: memories of past regimes in Shakespeare's tragedies, the ruin in Wordsworth's poetry, the use of Bach and Beethoven in Brahms's fourth symphony, etc. And this idea becomes perhaps the central theme of Modernist art: Eliot's Wasteland; Pound's Cantos; Proust's In Search of Lost Time; and Joyce's Ulysses, which has a chapter specifically addressing music and nostalgia, all deal with people unable to cope with modern society's problems finding solutions in their memory.

But additionally, I find that a lot of musicians turn to old recordings not only for nostalgia but for what Arthur Lovejoy, in his book The Great Chain of Being, calls the "pathos of the esoteric." As Lovejoy writes: "How exciting and how welcome is the sense of initiation into hidden mysteries!" I find this impulse behind a lot of the older clarinetists searching out Chedeville mouthpieces or developing a double-lip embouchure: "Hey! Harold Wright was onto something!" And the fact that so many younger players don't care is indicative of moral and artistic decay rather than new playing traditions emerging, altering, or even supplanting the old.

I listen a lot to older recordings. I don't listen to them, though, out of a sense of nostalgia (because I wasn't alive during the era of Marcellus and Wright) or to feel initiated into clarinet nerdom (because gross). Rather, I find older recordings interesting documents of various playing traditions, elements of which may have gone out of style.

As with manners, we feel as though the things we do with expression are the way things should be and the way things always have been: "Beat 4 leads to beat 1 because Tabuteau said so!" or "Be sure you don't change tempo unless it's indicated by the composer!" Many musicians, for better or worse, take these norms as eternal truths. In older recordings, however, I enjoy hearing that it isn't the case, that rubato can stretch the limits of what we consider "good taste" (Grieg's piano recordings, for instance), tempos can fluctuate drastically as a method of demarcating form (Richard Strauss's famous Mozart symphony no. 40 recording), and that Tabuteau's sostenuto isn't the only approach to wind playing (any historical-performance recording). And even if I don't play with Grieg's rubato, I think it makes me a better musician for being aware of his tradition and my own.

Post Edited (2020-11-02 22:40)

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