Klarinet Archive - Posting 000172.txt from 1994/03

From: Cary Karp <nrm-karp@-----.SE>
Subj: Re: History question...
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 1994 03:25:39 -0500

On Thu, 10 Mar 1994, SCOTT MCCHESNEY wrote:

> All this setup is to ask this: each instrument, if I remember correctly, had
> an ancestor that sounded vaguely like the present-day instruemtn around in
> Shakespear's day. There were flutes, oboes, a really funky bassoon, and
> brass instruments of all shapes, colors, and kinds. There were even drums
> around. But, what was around that fits the humble Clarinet family? The
> Clarinet, as I understood it, didn't really come about until Mozart - the
> early to mid 1700's. We're almost a hundred years off, yet there are
> Clarinet parts.

Yes, there were double-reeds, flutes and brass instruments around in
Shakespeare's day. You would, however, be very hard put to tag any but
a few of them as recognizable predecessors of our present-day horns.

Single-reed instruments are also all over the place during the course of
traceable organological history but there was no single-reed instrument
that we know of in the secular, sacred, or theater ensembles of Willy's
day that even wildly could be seen as a precursor of the clarinet.

The clarinet, as we might accept the notion, is a product of the late 17th
century and appears to be the result of experiments conducted fitting a
single-reed to a recorder. The prototype for the reed was probably an organ
pipe, rather than some speculative "primitive chalumeaux" as is repeatedly
suggested in the literature.