Klarinet Archive - Posting 000373.txt from 1996/03

From: Karl Krelove <KClarinet@-----.COM>
Subj: Re: Small Children-Small Instruments
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 18:49:51 -0500

In a message dated 96-03-10 14:31:13 EST, Gary Van Cott writes:

>John Dokler wrote (in part):
>
>> I am considering buying this as a small instrument in case
>> one of my small children shows a interest in learning clarinet. If the
>> string players can start on 1/4 and 1/2 size instruments, why not wind
>> players?
>
>What is the thinking on this by teachers and music educators? I have
>been thinking of starting my daughter (who will be nine this month)
>on clarinet some time in the next 12 months. She is much smaller than
>her older brother who not tall by any means. He started at about 10
>and 1/2 and complained for the first six months about reaching keys
>and the weight of the instrument.
>
>It would make some sense to start her on an Eb. However, I wonder
>what the downside would be when it was time to switch? Finding a
>decent, inexpensive Eb would be a challenge as well.
>
I wrote the following before having read David Niethamer's reply to the
original post:
>>David Niethamer wrote
>>*Once* I started a student on Eb clarinet. I was a new teacher, and when
>>some very enthusiastic parents of a third grader with quite small hands
>>inquired about the options for immediately beginning lessons, I had the
>>brainstorm to use the Eb clarinet. ...Starting on the Eb was not a
particular
>>physical problem in terms of embouchure and tone production. The student
>>did quite well for a year and a half...
David's experience notwithstanding, my reaction to the idea of starting
children on Eb clarinet remains as I wrote it, and so I send it basically
unchanged. I have had the same experience as David, however, in several other
situations in which I made special but supposedly temporary accomodations for
children only to find that when they outgrew their "specialness," they were
no longer interested in being the same as everyone else.

The downside isn't when it's time to switch, it's right at the beginning.
The piccolo (Eb and D) clarinets are more difficult to control, especially
above the break, than the soprano Bb and A. There is a major difference
between a small clarinet and a small violin. The violin (or other string
instrument) plays at the same pitch level no matter what its size. The
physics aren't worth going into here (I'm not sure I'd get them completely
right, anyway), but basically the two year old on a 1/20 violin is still
playing 440Hz on his A string and can easily apply the force to make the
string vibrate at that pitch. The big effect of the smaller string instrument
(apart from the shorter reach and lighter weight) is on the tone quality -
there just can't be the resonance or volume from so small a box. With a wind
instrument, a substantially shorter instrument plays correspondingly higher
in pitch. To get and keep a reed vibrating at the higher speeds, more energy
is needed. Without trying to work out the physical reasons, we all know from
practical experience that the higher you go (even on a soprano), the more
embouchre strength and control you need to have developed to keep the
clarinet in tune or even get it to speak. Piccolo clarinets (and other wind
instruments) are notoriously out of tune and unreliable in their response
even when played by adults. A good Eb player has made a considerable effort
to overcome the instrument's inherent problems. Many small children, even at
nine or ten years old, would, I suspect (despite David's experience with one
individual), be hard pressed even to get the reed to speak much above D or E
(top space of the staff).
If an 11 year old is still complaining after six months (he started at
10.5) about the reach and weight of a full-size clarinet, unless he is
unusually small he may be telling his parents and teacher that he really
isn't interested in the clarinet at all, but perhaps is interested in some
completely different instrument. Most of my ten year old students (I teach
full time in a public elementary school) can handle the reach by the second
or third month of playing (not always consistently, but well enough to be
comfortable so long as I don't make an issue of the occasional squeaks on G's
and F's). Many of my 4th graders this year (who started in October) have been
experimenting for weeks with notes from C (third space) to G a fifth above,
which I won't even teach them to do until they can reach low F reasonably
consistently.