Klarinet Archive - Posting 000533.txt from 1995/04

From: Fred Jacobowitz <fredj@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Reasons, reasons, reasons
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 10:45:31 -0400

Dan,
You've been an extremely vocal and persuasive opponent of the
"Blown out" phenomenon. However, I think you ought to remember what was
said about just about every natural phenomenon in history: "The earth is
not flat", "The sun revolves about the earth", "E=MC2", "People with cow
pos don't get small pox", "DDT is dangerous", "Chronic fatigue syndrome
exists", "PMS is real", "Gulf war syndrome exists"....... Yes, every one of
these
statements was roundly ridiculed when it was proposed. It took a long
time for some to be proved out. The last one, only last month after
years of complaints by vets who were told they were crazy! (turns out
that a combination of anti-mosquito stuff and anti nerve-gas medication
causes it! Who'd have thunk it?). To paraphrase the words of the immortal
Anon, "Don't knock it if you haven't experienced it". I can fully understand
skepticism by those who have not had it happen to them but stop with the
near-vilification, please. I may be wrong about the cause but I am not
delusional. My instrument DID change, for whatever the reason.

Fred Jacobowitz

On Wed, 26 Apr 1995, Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu wrote:

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