At 07:09 PM 10/3/03 -0400, David H. Bailey wrote: >Conductors are often caught between a rock and a hard place -- balancing >the preparation of many weeks of concerts with the strict adherence to >the printed score. > >Many community bands come together for a rehearsal or two and then >essentially to sight-read 10 or 12 weekly concerts. > >And as a composer you can be as angry or upset or put-out or indignant >about it as you wish, but the fact of the matter is that not all of us >are blessed with audition-only, play-everything-perfectly-or-you're-out >groups. Many of us work with less-than-ideal situations from a >musical-perfection point-of-view. > >I paraphrase that old prayer: God grant me the strength to fix those >passages can be fixed, the serenity to accept that which can never be >played quite perfectly and the wisdom to know the difference. > >With my community orchestra I was amazed at how quickly the would forget >what we had gone over at the previous rehearsal regarding rhythms, >pitches, basic stuff. Often the next rehearsal would seem like they >were reading the music for the very first time.
My comments are not about either perfection or 'strict adherence to the printed score', they're about playing -- or being committed to play -- what's written down without excuses or slovenliness, and for the conductor to (a) notice and (b) point it out. Why choose music you can't play well, or don't want to play well, or don't want even to try to play well? And to stand by damaging it, no less, by blaming it on some 'rock and hard place' decision that you've chosen for yourself! Just leave it alone, and do something that can actually be accomplished. And if that can't be done, for goodness sake, have some principles and don't do it at all! This is the saddest defense of shoddy behavior as I've ever heard. In this community of folks who are worried about the minuscule placement of accent marks or elegant spacing proportions, you are happy not only to defend but to encourage and participate in the making of the musical equivalent of chicken scratch. I love amateur performers. On the looking-up side of the baton, I am one, and know the struggle. But something is very wrong when the music is not appropriately chosen and, if that's been done, it's also not made clear from the start that the players are expected to do their best to perform what's shown on the page, and not willy-nilly think of notational indications as optional niceties that their compositional judgment, however immature, may override. It really *is* staggering, and an example of a point I've made before on this list: that many performers (and, it seems, conductors) don't ultimately care about the music they're playing -- and so composers are wise to insist on detailed notation rather than leave judgments in the hands of players they don't already know well and trust implicitly. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
