Klarinet Archive - Posting 000281.txt from 1994/04

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Reeds: re comments of David Ressler and Clark Fobes
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 1994 12:07:50 -0400

Here Fobes and I are mostly in agreement so he must be correct.

People become obsessed with reeds. Their entire life begins to center around
the belief that if they ever either get a good one or learn the secret of
making good ones, that no other element of their clarinet playing will be
an impediment ever again. It's all reeds. It's nothing but reeds.

Once I met a player in New York who showed up on a gig and had left his
several boxes of brand X at home by mistake. He was in panic. I gave him
an extra box of Van Dorens that I had and he selected and played about
6 of them, and HE SOUNDED WONDERFUL!!!! But he gave them all back to
me with the oxymoronic statement, "I just can't play on Van Dorens."

He had become so insane about reeds that he refused to accept a brand
when he sounded perfectly wonderful with their use simply because it
was the brand that he "could not use." It is classic brand insanity.

Reeds are important. Good reeds are important. Particular brands of
reeds are, in my opinion, far less important than is given credence on
this board. I don't work very well with reeds and I never developed
a good skill with a reed knife, but there were some players I worked with
who could take anything, including a piece of the table at which we
were sitting, and make a perfectly acceptable reed in a few minutes.
And all of this was brand notwithstanding. Herb Blayman, now retired
from the Met, was such a person. He could take any reed, any brand,
any strength, arbitrarily chosen 10 minutes before a performance of
Elektra and use it that night, sounding his usual magnificent self.

As Clark says, a warped mouthpiece is such that !!NO!! reed will ever work
on it. As a number of people on this board have said, a bad mouthpiece
is such that it will !!NEVER!! play well, no matter what you do to it.

The issue is not so much the reed but the mouthpiece. If you are having
what you believe to be reed difficulties, you are probably having mouthpiece
difficulties and are spending a fortune on reeds trying to fix a problem
whose source is elsewhere.

I do not reject the importance of good cane and reliable manufacturing in
the reed itself. There are factors that will make some reeds more
difficult to deal with than others and these factors occasionally show up
as distinguishing brands from one another. Obviously all reeds are not
the same quality. But this obsession with reeds as being the ne plus ultra
of clarinet playing borders on the psychotic. And anyone, absolutely
anyone, who says that Brand X is the "only reed to play on" is completely
without any credibility, despite the apparent firmness and knowledge
inherent to such a statement.

Simeon Bellison used to play on planks from the deck of a four masted
schooner. He made them himself and they were wonderful. Several of
the most versatile players in the NY free-lance scene used to buy the
least expensive reeds they could lay their hands on because they went
through so many, worked them themselves, and they sounded wonderful. They
went through so many no because they needed to find a good one but because
they worked so much -- 3-5 gigs a day.

This reed-craziness borders on the clarinet-brand craziness that I read
about in this list day after day after day. And it is discouraging to
think that wonderful players dissipate their skill, talent, and energies
pursuing a path that is fundamentally established by marketeers selling
their products and whose marketing words are acceped as being based in
technical truth, often a very poor assumption.

Good luck. I am going back to sleep.

====================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
(leeson@-----.edu)
====================================

   
     Copyright © Woodwind.Org, Inc. All Rights Reserved    Privacy Policy    Contact charette@woodwind.org