Contratrombone64
Admiral of Fugues
This is a snippet of some advice Tony Pay provided about articulation (in his case the work in question was/is the Mozart clarinet concerto). Which we all know was most definitely NOT written for a "clarient" at least, not the clarinet that has evolved into the modern, 20 something key nightmare (I speak from experience as clarinet was my first instrument).
Here's Tony's text ...
David Blumberg wrote some generous words about my K622 recording. I'd like to take the opportunity say something about that performance, which has been criticised several times, here and elsewhere, for being 'over-articulated'.
First of all, I nowadays play many more passages legato. (It's over 20 years old, remember.) So I must have come to agree that a greater variety of articulation is preferable.
I should say that an aspect of the situation that's not often realised is that in many ways, it's much easier on a period instrument to produce flowing articulated passagework than it is to produce flowing legato passagework. Cross-fingerings and other acoustical unevennesses mean that adjacent notes can have very different responses, and the separation produced by articulation gives you the split-second that allows you to correct that.
So I suppose that as I've got better on the instrument, I'm able to play more of it legato
On the other hand, Mozart's own Klavier playing was described as being particularly detached, so that might seem to justify erring on the side of over- rather than under-articulation in his music.
Of course, the absence of slurs in many passages of both first edition and the Winterthur fragment, as well as in many other Mozart autographs, doesn't necessarily mean that Mozart wanted those passages played staccato. The scores of the period were intended to be read against the background of a well-understood performance convention, according to which players would quite naturally have produced an articulation appropriate to their understanding of the musical gesture. Where Mozart felt he needed to be explicit, he wrote a slur; but where he could trust the performer, or where the precise details didn't matter to him, he didn't. This sort of notation is sometimes called 'descriptive', or 'thin' notation; in contrast to, say, the notation of a composer like Webern, which is called 'prescriptive' or 'thick' notation.
The important thing, in my view, is to encourage students to try to find an articulation 'appropriate to the musical gesture', as I put it above. And that, of course, demands that we have some notion of what classical musical gestures ARE, as well as some experience of putting them into practice.
A particularly important feature of 'thin' notation is that it leaves classical stylistic structures (things like appoggiaturas, bar hierarchy, phrase shape and so on) open to be applied to VARYING DEGREES. So two different interpretations of a passage -- say, one that sees it as dramatic and another that sees it as more lyrical -- may be best served by two different articulations. And THAT means, crucially, that performers need not fix their interpretation, but can play 'from the same score' in different ways on different occasions.
Player-editors who ignore this, preferring to apply the conventions of later, romantic music to the scores of the classical period, may well produce articulations significantly removed from what Mozart might have expected from a performer.
That's for two reasons. First, those player-editors have views about the nature of the musical gesture that may be much at odds with what is known about the musical conventions operating when the music was written; and second, they produce a version of the score that transforms the flexible, 'thin' notation into a prescriptive 'thick' one, drastically curtailing performance freedom by adding the dynamics and slurs that they personally happen to fancy. Indeed, it's rather frightening to see the degree to which Alamiro Giampieri dominated the Italian clarinet scene for decades via his editions for Ricordi, managing to mangle the texts of Mozart, Weber, Brahms and Schumann alike to suit his own indiscriminate taste -- and of course, to suit his pocket;-) He had the audacity to print, on those editions, 'It is obligatory in performance to publish on the programme not only the name of the composer, but that of the editor, Alamiro Giampieri.'
To go back to the original question: in a student performance, the difference between an unacceptable articulation and an acceptable one -- between one that damages the listeners' understanding of the musical structure and one that supports it -- is usually one that has to be explained both in the technical world and in the emotional world. So I try to characterise articulation choices for a student in those rather general terms.
Usually, an unacceptable articulation is one that obscures important note groupings. An example for me would be bars 81-84 of K622(i), where bar 81 is clearly in 4, bar 82 in 2, and bars 83 and 84 in 1: there is a progressive calming of the rhythmic impulse. In this progression, the equal division of bar 82 is created by the two downward-hanging loops of triplets; and those loops become the single double-length semiquaver loop of bar 83. A 'mistaken' articulation in that reading would therefore be to play bar 83 as 'slur two and tongue two', creating a division of the bar into 4 and interrupting the progression towards one-in-a-bar.
A student might not agree, of course; but the point is to link the emotional description 'calming' to the technical description 'going towards a bar in one from a bar in four'. To make it 'work' the other way around (becoming MORE energetic because of the move from triplets to semiquavers) is possible but difficult; you'd need to give particular directions to the orchestra too.
To end on a lighter note: the 'best' reason I ever heard for a particular articulation in the Mozart concerto was given me by one Valentin Zakharov, to whom I was introduced in 1975 in Australia. He was the then principal clarinet of the Sydney Opera Orchestra, and I was on tour with the Fires of London, which was a British group that specialised in the music of Peter Maxwell Davies.
We decided as usual to try each other's setups; but when we got our instruments out he treated me to such a dazzling squirt of clarinet virtuosity that I felt unable to compete. So, when he looked at me expectantly, I played him a bit of the Mozart concerto.
"Ah," he said. "You know, in Russia, we play that passage staccato!"
I was puzzled. "What do you mean, 'in Russia'?" I said. "Surely you don't mean, EVERYONE in Russia?"
"Of course!" he said, with that stunning blend of implausibility and total conviction that people like him often have.
"But,...why?"
"Well, because otherwise, in a competition, we would have no way of deciding who is the best player!"
Tony
Here's Tony's text ...
David Blumberg wrote some generous words about my K622 recording. I'd like to take the opportunity say something about that performance, which has been criticised several times, here and elsewhere, for being 'over-articulated'.
First of all, I nowadays play many more passages legato. (It's over 20 years old, remember.) So I must have come to agree that a greater variety of articulation is preferable.
I should say that an aspect of the situation that's not often realised is that in many ways, it's much easier on a period instrument to produce flowing articulated passagework than it is to produce flowing legato passagework. Cross-fingerings and other acoustical unevennesses mean that adjacent notes can have very different responses, and the separation produced by articulation gives you the split-second that allows you to correct that.
So I suppose that as I've got better on the instrument, I'm able to play more of it legato
On the other hand, Mozart's own Klavier playing was described as being particularly detached, so that might seem to justify erring on the side of over- rather than under-articulation in his music.Of course, the absence of slurs in many passages of both first edition and the Winterthur fragment, as well as in many other Mozart autographs, doesn't necessarily mean that Mozart wanted those passages played staccato. The scores of the period were intended to be read against the background of a well-understood performance convention, according to which players would quite naturally have produced an articulation appropriate to their understanding of the musical gesture. Where Mozart felt he needed to be explicit, he wrote a slur; but where he could trust the performer, or where the precise details didn't matter to him, he didn't. This sort of notation is sometimes called 'descriptive', or 'thin' notation; in contrast to, say, the notation of a composer like Webern, which is called 'prescriptive' or 'thick' notation.
The important thing, in my view, is to encourage students to try to find an articulation 'appropriate to the musical gesture', as I put it above. And that, of course, demands that we have some notion of what classical musical gestures ARE, as well as some experience of putting them into practice.
A particularly important feature of 'thin' notation is that it leaves classical stylistic structures (things like appoggiaturas, bar hierarchy, phrase shape and so on) open to be applied to VARYING DEGREES. So two different interpretations of a passage -- say, one that sees it as dramatic and another that sees it as more lyrical -- may be best served by two different articulations. And THAT means, crucially, that performers need not fix their interpretation, but can play 'from the same score' in different ways on different occasions.
Player-editors who ignore this, preferring to apply the conventions of later, romantic music to the scores of the classical period, may well produce articulations significantly removed from what Mozart might have expected from a performer.
That's for two reasons. First, those player-editors have views about the nature of the musical gesture that may be much at odds with what is known about the musical conventions operating when the music was written; and second, they produce a version of the score that transforms the flexible, 'thin' notation into a prescriptive 'thick' one, drastically curtailing performance freedom by adding the dynamics and slurs that they personally happen to fancy. Indeed, it's rather frightening to see the degree to which Alamiro Giampieri dominated the Italian clarinet scene for decades via his editions for Ricordi, managing to mangle the texts of Mozart, Weber, Brahms and Schumann alike to suit his own indiscriminate taste -- and of course, to suit his pocket;-) He had the audacity to print, on those editions, 'It is obligatory in performance to publish on the programme not only the name of the composer, but that of the editor, Alamiro Giampieri.'
To go back to the original question: in a student performance, the difference between an unacceptable articulation and an acceptable one -- between one that damages the listeners' understanding of the musical structure and one that supports it -- is usually one that has to be explained both in the technical world and in the emotional world. So I try to characterise articulation choices for a student in those rather general terms.
Usually, an unacceptable articulation is one that obscures important note groupings. An example for me would be bars 81-84 of K622(i), where bar 81 is clearly in 4, bar 82 in 2, and bars 83 and 84 in 1: there is a progressive calming of the rhythmic impulse. In this progression, the equal division of bar 82 is created by the two downward-hanging loops of triplets; and those loops become the single double-length semiquaver loop of bar 83. A 'mistaken' articulation in that reading would therefore be to play bar 83 as 'slur two and tongue two', creating a division of the bar into 4 and interrupting the progression towards one-in-a-bar.
A student might not agree, of course; but the point is to link the emotional description 'calming' to the technical description 'going towards a bar in one from a bar in four'. To make it 'work' the other way around (becoming MORE energetic because of the move from triplets to semiquavers) is possible but difficult; you'd need to give particular directions to the orchestra too.
To end on a lighter note: the 'best' reason I ever heard for a particular articulation in the Mozart concerto was given me by one Valentin Zakharov, to whom I was introduced in 1975 in Australia. He was the then principal clarinet of the Sydney Opera Orchestra, and I was on tour with the Fires of London, which was a British group that specialised in the music of Peter Maxwell Davies.
We decided as usual to try each other's setups; but when we got our instruments out he treated me to such a dazzling squirt of clarinet virtuosity that I felt unable to compete. So, when he looked at me expectantly, I played him a bit of the Mozart concerto.
"Ah," he said. "You know, in Russia, we play that passage staccato!"
I was puzzled. "What do you mean, 'in Russia'?" I said. "Surely you don't mean, EVERYONE in Russia?"
"Of course!" he said, with that stunning blend of implausibility and total conviction that people like him often have.
"But,...why?"
"Well, because otherwise, in a competition, we would have no way of deciding who is the best player!"
Tony