Klarinet Archive - Posting 000810.txt from 1997/05

From: Gary Young <gyoung@-----.com>
Subj: RE: A clarinet
Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 09:23:57 -0400

On May 28 Dan Leeson wrote (I've snipped virtually all of his (as usual)
thoughtful comments):

This is not a performance practice issue but a matter of a sonic pallette
as selected and used by the composer but arbitrarily ignored by the player.

The question is: What evidence do we have that a certain composer selected
a certain clarinet for a certain composition because of the "sonic palette"
he or she wanted to create? As far as I can see, we never have such
evidence, unless the composer happened to say or write "I wanted the A
clarinet here for its distinctive sound," or at least, "Here I used the
distinctive sound of the A clarinet." As far as I know, Mozart, for
instance, never said such a thing -- if he had, surely Dan would know and
would have adduced this statement in support of his position.

Dan's argument, stripped to its essentials, seems to be this (this is an
invitation to Dan to tell me where I've misunderstood him):

1. Composer X had (or has) a very sensitive ear. Cf. Dan's "Mahler, who
had a pretty good ear" and "a person with as good an ear as Mozart (and
Beethoven, too)." In other words, X can (or could) tell the difference
between A, B flat and C clarinets.

2. Therefore if X uses (say) an A clarinet, it is because X wants the A
clarinet's particular contribution to the "sonic palette" X seeks.
(Fallback position: When X uses (say) an A clarinet, for whatever reason,
X will exploit the A clarinet's particular contribution to the "sonic
palette" X seeks.)

3. Therefore, if we use a B flat clarinet to play X's piece, we are
violating X's intention in a significant way -- i.e. not merely by using an
instrument that differs from the one X specified, but one that differs in a
way X regarded as important. We're screwing up X's sound palette!

At first point 1 sounds trivially true -- don't all composers have good
ears? Well, no. In particular, there is no reason to think a priori that
a randomly selected composer could tell the difference between A, B flat
and C clarinets in a blind test consistently. So as a general argument,
this fails.

Dan loads the argument by citing Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler. Suppose Dan
could prove to us that these composers could tell an A from a B flat,
consistently in a series of blind tests. (And just how would he do that,
if not by a rhetorical appeal to our enormous respect for these composers?
How can we tell which composers can distinguish clarinets and which can't?
For certainly not all can.) So what? This brings us to step 2. Did
Mozart write the Concerto and Quintet K. 581 in A major because he wanted
the special sound of the A clarinet? That's what step 2 says. Or did he
write the pieces for A clarinet because he wanted them to be in A major?
Isn't the latter a real possibility? Dan's reply (the fallback position
of step 2) is that this does not matter: even if Mozart wrote the Concerto
for A clarinet because he wanted it in the key of A,

"once the clarinet of specific pitch was selected by virtue of the reason
above, is there any doubt that a person with as good an ear as Mozart
(and Beethoven, too) would not exploit that particular clarinet's unique
sound?"

Here I confess puzzlement. However you state it, step 2 requires the
concept of the A clarinet's "unique sound." What does Dan mean by this?
Dan has, in a series of fascinating postings to Klarinet and articles on
sneezy, argued that "dark," "bright," "mellow" and other such terms do not
denote any intersubjectively meaningful properties of clarinet sound.
(Note that this view is consistent with the possibility that a given
person, say Mozart, could always tell whether a clarinet was an A or a B
flat -- it just means he could not explain the difference to anyone else in
intersubjectively meaningful terms. It's like chicken sexing.) But aren't
these the very terms that people use to describe the difference between the
sound of an A and that of a B flat? (E.g. Fred Jacobowitz, in a recent
posting, said the A's sound is "mellower" than the B flat's. I want to say
the same thing.) If these terms are meaningless, how can we describe the A
clarinet's "unique sound"? What could possibly make us think it is unique?

On Dan's view, if I understand it, that leaves only experimentally
verifiable physical properties of clarinet sound as a basis to distinguish
A from B flat clarinets. Moreover, those objective properties must not
underlie the use of such ordinary words as "dark" and "bright" and "mellow"
to describe clarinet sound, for if they were the objective basis of such
talk, then such talk would be intersubjectively meaningful. At this point
I reach the limit of my knowledge, and can only ask: Are there any such
demonstrable differences between the sounds of A and B flat clarinets? If
not, then Dan's step 2 (and thus step 3) is inconsistent with his view that
"dark" etc. have no meaning.

Well, I've gone on long enough. I hope this makes some sense. Thanks for
your patience with this quasi-philosophical stuff. I've found Dan's
comments always stimulating and often persuasive, and it may well be I've
missed his point here.

Gary Young
Madison, WI