Klarinet Archive - Posting 000641.txt from 1997/01

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Which clarinet
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 12:47:31 -0500

I thank David Neithamer of Richmond for his very thoughtful analysis
of which clarinet under what circumstance. He mentioned a point that
I had not thought of before and I want to document it while it is
fresh on my mind.

There are dozens of examples where one publisher will produce parts for
an orchestra and then another publisher, for any of a dozen reasons,
alters the clarinet parts during republication of the same music for
distribution and sale elsewhere.

Nowhere is this more true than in the Russian editions of music in
which the composer takes advantage of a particular kind of clarinet
(available and common in Russia) but which rarely exists in the US
and thus requires some modifcation. The best known example of this
is Peter and the Wolf which, in the original, is for clarinet in
B-flat with extension down to low E-flat. For those of you who have
played this on A clarinet for years, be aware that this is not what
Prokoffief wrote. The famous "cat" solo starts on low E, going as
follows: "Solo music of the cat" E A C# A E E-flat ... etc.

Now when this work was to be published in an edition for western
Europe and America, the clarinet part was changed to A clarinet
by the publisher. Theyrealized at once that the majority of
western players could not execute the passage as written.

The net result of all this is that one cannot trust even the edition.
For on top of the clarinet players making arbitrary changes of one
clarinet to another are the publishers doing even stranger things.

One of the editions of the Mozart Requiem has the basset horn parts
transposed for B-flat clarinet, and one of the movements is transposed
for an A clarinet. If one does not know very much about this sort
of thing, one might conclude that Mozart wrote the Requiem requesting
a clarinet in A, when, in fact, he uses no clarinets at all.

But Russian editions published by western publishers have to be the
most suspect of all.

All of this kind of activity adds another dimension to the problem that
I had completely neglected in my earlier comments on the matter and
I thank David for reminding me of them.

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