Klarinet Archive - Posting 000471.txt from 1995/04
From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU> Subj: Reasons, reasons, reasons Date: Wed, 26 Apr 1995 18:25:16 -0400
This discussion about saliva may be fascinating and it may even be the
cause of what is often called blow-out.
But, it may not be.
It is very easy to derive scenarios about what might be causing a phenomenon,
but we have to be at least 1,000 miles from agreeing that the phenomenon
exists, much less what causes it.
This kind of thing happens in musicological scholarship all the time. One is
arguing about Beethoven's cause of deafness, or Schubert's alleged
homosexuality, or whatever and then, suddenly, someone comes up with a
scenario. It goes like this:
But suppose Beethoven's letters to his immortal beloved were
not mailed from Bonn but from Munich. That would explain why
they took longer to get to Freiburg and that would be the reason
why she ditched him.
And suddenly, all the music journals announce the "letters from Munich"
theory, and in five years, it becomes the "letters from Munich" hypothesis,
and in five more years, it becomes accepted fact. And then "letters from
Munich" is offered as the way things actually went. All this from, "
suppose Beethoven's letters ..."
It is one thing to suggest that bacteria in saliva might cause some
change in the clarinet, and quite another to establish as fact that such
a change defines the thing called blow out. We must have heard a dozen
things that may or may not occur when blow out strikes a clarinet. The
least convincing statement was "It doesn't feel the same." The more
convincing statements dealt with objective assessments of pitch changes.
But there is no uniformity of opinion as to what the problem is, to say
nothing about what may or may not be causing it.
We're not there folks. In fact, on this subject, we're not anywhere except
smoke and mirrors.
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Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
(leeson@-----.edu)
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