Re: The Remarkable Mr. Domingo

Date: 12 Jul 2003 19:03:51 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.music.opera
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>But isnt it true that Pavarotti learned his music by rote and with his
>musicality, but Domingo on the other hand who is musically literate learned
>his
>music on his own?
To be honest, I don't fully understand this question. Both Pavarotti and
Domingo are musical. So are you and I. Musicality is something we are all
innately endowed with, and we all exist somewhere along a continuum that
extends from the utterly tone deaf at one extreme to the Mozart's at the other. Both Domingo and Pavarotti are able to learn roles because they are endowed
with some degree of musicality. If either was completely tone deaf, we would
never have heard of him, because he could never have pursued a career in music. (When we say of somebody else, "He or she is musical," what we really mean is
"He or she is appreciably more musical than average.")
Pavarotti has to rely on somebody else to teach him a role because he can't
read music. He could in fact learn to read music, although the younger you
are, the easier it is to learn. Domingo is able to teach himself a role
because he can read music. His ability to read music is not innate, although
the ability to learn to read music depends on mental and musical capacities he
is natively endowed with. Pavarotti is endowed with analogous mental and
musical capacities but hasn't used them to acquire the ability to read music.
>If you strongly disagree that the result would not be the
>same with the two different methods, how do you explain your choice?
Once a role has been learned either way, whether through a coach or through a
coach who happens to be yourself, how are we to tell what the route to the
final result was? There is no difference between a literate man saying "Let's
get some lunch" and an illiterate man saying "Let's get some lunch." Of
course, an illiterate actor would have to get a coach to teach him that line if
he had to say it in a play.
The differences that matter to me have to do with how musical I perceive a
singer to be. Above all, I base my opinion on a singer's phrasing of the
musical shapes he sings. Obviously, I base my opinion on what I hear, and I
would not be able to hear anything if a singer didn't have both a technique
(the ability to produce sound) and some degree of musicianship. One index of
musicianship is the ability to read music, but, at a more basic level,
musicianship entails the use of your native musical endowment, what we call
musicality, to learn how to grasp and produce or reproduce musical shapes in
the regions of time (rhythm) and pitch (melody) simultaneously. The
demonstration of musicality depends on musicianship, but the quality of the
result depends to a considerable extent on how musical you are, just how
sensitive to musical shapes you are.
-david gable