Klarinet Archive - Posting 000497.txt from 1996/03

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Delton Sizemore and the basset horn
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 13:19:55 -0500

Several telling comments in Del's posting about the basset horn lead
me to a preliminary conclusion about his mouthpiece/reed set up on
his Buffet b.h.

I do not know if Del has the Buffet b.h. with the wide bore (as per
the LeBlanc instruments) or the narrow bore (as per the Selmer
instruments) and the fact is that Buffet changed from one to the other
within the last 10 years or so. But I am going to presume a narrow
bored instrument since they made so many before they changed over
to the wide bore.

When I first began playing my narrow bored Selmer instrument (and then
compounded the problem by buying a second b.h., that owned by Mazzeo
and sold to me after he left the BSO), I had serious reservations
about the effort I had to make to get a sound out. It was hard to
blow. It was terribly resistant.

Inside of me was the macho belief that anyone who played b.h. on less
than a #5 reed wasn't a real man, and besides, that's what I used on
my soprano clarinets so didn't it make sense to use the same strength
reed on a b.h.? And the answer to that question is NO, NO, NO, NO.

I am of the opinion that something about the length/bore-size combination
makes a narrow bored b.h. is more resistant than a clarinet, though
I have nothing but intuition and instinct to support that hypothesis.
The first major breakthrough that I had was when I changed to a #2
reed and much of the resistance of the instrument simply disappeared.

The second breakthrough I had occurred when I not only changed
mouthpieces but had it bored to a dimension that matched the
dimension of the bocal into which it fits. If Del will measure
the mouthpiece tenon's interior dimensions as it enters the bocal,
and then measure the bocal interior dimension, he should find
enough of a mismatch for a problem. Boring out the mouthpiece
(get someone who knows how to do this better than the average person)
improved the resistance, but made the instrument sharp (or maybe flat,
I forget). So the mouthpiece was cut down at the tenon to make it
shorter.

This compensated for the bore size change, the instrument was back
in tune, the resistance all but gone, and I played on that setup
for 25 years, doing almost 200 Requiems of Mozart, 150 Gran Partittas,
and many performances of Electra, Frau Ohne Schatten, Rosenkavalier,
etc.

Charlie Bay did all the mouthpiece work for me. His comments since
that time are that the changes that I described seemed to help many
people but did not help others at all. I make no claim to a
world-wide discovery, only one that helped me.

But there is some empirical evidence to support this theory.

Paul Howland (brother of the famous clarinet teacher at Fresno) was
a NY freelancer for years and years. He did all the basset horn work
in NY until his death. I went to see Paul with my b.h. and he showed
me his around 1964.

His instrument had a hand made case with a slot for a mouthpiece that
was too small to fit a standard sized clarinet mouthpiece. In order
for the m.p. to fit, it would have had to be made shorter.

But if one cuts down a clarinet m.p. to a shorter size (without changing
anything else), it does not play in tune. The compensation is to
widen the bore. And that is what Paul had done to his mouthpiece and
he tried it for me using a poor blank to begin with. The effect
was good but not earth shaking. I had to work on the problem for a
long while before solving it completely.

Paul had purchased his b.h. from the widow of a guy who had the
case made around 1905. And I do not consider it an accident that
the case dimensions for the mouthpiece so closely matched what I
later discovered worked for me.

Bottom line is that a standard clarinet mouthpiece is contraindicated
for a narrow bored basset horn such as those made by both Selmer and
Buffet until recently. Selmer has continued with the narrow bore but
Buffet changed.

Oh yes. Charlie Bay also put an alto sax facing on my shortened,
wide bore mouthpieces when he made both of them. That helped a
great deal too.

I may have had problems elsewhere, but never with resistance after
the effort I described changed my entire perception of how to play
the instrument.

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