On 29 Sep 2007 at 23:38, Aaron Sherber wrote: > At 10:45 PM 9/29/2007, David W. Fenton wrote: > >Having looked at the score, I would say that I think the score is > >wrong (it's bowed as 2+3 quite regularly -- I can only hear the > >triplet as upbeat of 3, not as downbeat of 3). > > Okay, well, I know this is a silly argument, since clearly > Tchaikowsky had a good idea of what he was doing.
You're assuming, of course, that the score represents what Tchaikovsky intended (which may or may not be the case -- I know nothing at all about the relationship he had with his publishers nor what the source situation is for his symphonies). > And I did say > earlier that the melody all by itself could be heard the way you > describe. But look at the accompaniment in the clarinets at the > beginning. Or better yet, the horns after the first repeat. Hearing > the melody as 3+2 | 2+3 requires a quite willful shift in how that > accompanying figure is perceived. Oh, not necessarily. I don't see the clarinets as changing things at all (or the horns at the beginning) -- they both fit quite well into the 3+2 or the 2+3, though they have different rhythmic meaning in the two subdivisions. But, well, so what? Brahms did that kind of thing all the time. As to the horns, I just don't see anywhere at all in the first 7 or 8 pages where there's anything at all that would make it completely impossible to hear it as 3+2 | 2+3 with the occasional Brahmsian cross rhythm thrown in in order to keep you guessing. I have always heard the whole thing as completely *irregular* with constantly shifting patterns of accent, and looking at the score, I see lots of possible ambiguity in any number of places, just exactly the way I've always heard it (with the exception of the bowing of the main theme, which is quite regular in maintaining the 2+3 pattern). This is one of the first symphonies I got in my head, having gotten a recording of it back when I was in junior high school, and so my impressions of what it sounds like come from that LP that I practically wore out the grooves on. I can't even say who it was playing (the LP is in storage right now, so I can't check) -- might have been Stokowski (which might explain a lot! ;). In any event, I've often had trouble hearing a triplet on the downbeat as anything but an upbeat, instead. The Lohengrin 3rd Act Prelude is another example that I always had difficulty with (the triplet is on the downbeat, but my ear always wants to push it before the downbeat to make it an upbeat, with the actual 2nd beat ending up as the downbeat), and that dates back to playing the damned thing in high school band, long before I'd heard the opera as a whole (or had any real exposure to the complexities of Wagner's rhythm). Perhaps the players in my HS band were accenting that 2nd beat and that's why I heard it that way, but that tendency is still there. In the Tchaikovsky, I somehow tend to group the quarter notes into pairs, and that seems to outweight anything that the triplet does. If I were a conductor, I think I'd want to bring out all the rhythmic ambiguities, rather than trying to get everyone to slavishly play 2+3 throughout (which would be very boring to my ear). But I'm not, so I won't! :) -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
