Klarinet Archive - Posting 000210.txt from 1997/05

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: Step 2 of n - Dan Leeson
Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 08:32:45 -0400

I think I may have a first. In my Jahrbuch paper, I shall credit
an entire electronic mailing list and I believe that making such a
technical reference has never happened in Mozart research before.
But I am going to do it. Frankly, I am not sure that thanking an
electronic list in print in a scholarly journal has any
precedent anywhere. So it is good that the first time it happens
will be in conjunction with serious clarinet research.

You have no idea how many wonderful discussions of the problem of
why playing sharp keys on the 18th century clarinet had
impediments. Everyone tried to be helpful, but I must admit that
those who had actual experience on instruments of that period were
able to be more specific and, therefore, more helpful. None of the
comments I received were poor, though some went off in directions
that were not relevant to my interests such as the emotional impact
of one key as contrasted with another. It is an interesting
subject but not to my preoccupation.

I thought you might like to see how the technical substance of the
material has changed since I first posted it about a week ago.
Keep in mind that this text is in a footnote, and so I am motivated
to keep it short and not give all the detail that I might give in
the body of the paper.

But anyone who misses out using the resources of this list for
serious research on complicated clarinet problems is crazy. And I
am not crazy.

Key signature limitations for early clarinets are derived from
several technical problems inherent in the acoustics of the
instrument. The most important relates to the fact that the
clarinet plays only two scales naturally, F and C; i.e., when
a player's fingers cover all the holes of a clarinet, their
one-at-a-time removal in the natural sequence produces an F
major scale in the lower register. The upper register, using
the same fingers, produces a C major scale. Creating pitches
beyond this inherent design limitation requires additional
tone holes, indirect and remote control of their operation
through touchpiece management, and finger/hand movements
(i.e., half-holing, stretching, sliding, etc.) that inhibit
smooth performance. A great deal of what is referred to as
clarinet technique involves maintaining controlled operation
in the face of these impediments. Further, on the eighteenth
century clarinet, accurate production of certain pitches
beyond the natural F/C scales was problematic:
uncharacteristic sounds occasionally accompanied technical
improvements, and the rapid execution of certain intervals was
impractical or impossible. Key signatures with sharps and
flats both contained these problems but in sharp keys they
began earlier; i.e., even one sharp created difficulties.
Eventually, the problems also manifested themselves in flatted
keys, but not those typically encountered by the player; i.e.,
more than four flats. Thus, executing in keys other than F
and C was more effectively achieved in certain instances by
changing to a differently-pitched clarinet than by overcoming
the technical difficulties of the one at hand. In the late
eighteenth century, the end result of these complications was
the avoidance of key signatures having any number of sharps or
having more than one flat, a constraint that was slowly
modified over much of Mozart's productive life.

I think that's better but it is not there yet. Feel free to jump
on it. I can do nothing but gain from your helpful and
constructive criticism.

For younger students on this list (and we are all students in the
process of continuing our learning), you may be puzzled at this
kind of process. In formative years, one does research by going to
the appropriate books and finding out what specialists have thought
or said or discovered about certain phenomena. That is how one
writes, for example, a term paper. It is the right place to start
to learn how to do research.

But if one ever gets to the point of asking questions whose answers
are not in the reference books, or questions that have never been
asked before, or questions about which there is no definitive
posture, that's when this kind of an effort is worthwhile to
understand. Really serious research trys to answer a question that
has either never been asked before, or else one whose answer was
known in the past but somehow that information was not transmitted
to the present, or else one about which there is a great deal of
controversy and no definitive closure.

For some, this is not their idea of fun. And I can understand that.
It's tough slogging through the haystack of a world looking for
a needle. But in the final analysis, it is important to keep our
perspectives focused correctly.

If Dazely had not thought about the problem in the 1930s, we would have
no basset clarinet today and the Mozart concerto and quintet would be
perceived very differently. There is too much important research
to list it all, but Dazely's is a good one. He stuck a stick in the
ground and said, "We have been playing the Mozart concerto very
incorrectly because Mozart wrote that work for a clarinet which not
only no longer exists, but is not even understood by musicians to
have ever existed." That was a bold statement (though he did not
use these words, of course). Its impact on Mozart interpretation is
being felt to this day and will continue to be felt indefinitely.

I think we ought to have a statue to a guy like him. And if you
ever want to do serious, heavy-duty research (something that is
quite compatible with a playing career, incidentlly, and even
supplements it wonderfully), read what the many thoughtful people
on this list have said about that dopey problem of which I
am speaking: why were sharp keys treated differently that flat
keys on clarinets of the 18th century?

It is kind of like the classic question asked in the UK in the
1930s: "why isn't the culture growing in the Petrie dish where
there is greenmold?" That's one hell of a question because
coming from its answer is a whole new study of the pathology
of illness and how to treat some of it?

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California

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