Klarinet Archive - Posting 000224.txt from 1998/02

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: Was it elitism...?
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 04:42:00 -0500

Jack Kissinger has touched on the heart of the issue far more perceptively
than anyone so far. He makes reference to the fact that manufacturers
lavish more care on their wooden instruments than on their plastic
instruments. And that, in a nutshell, is exactly my point.

It is not the plastic that makes such an instrument inherently
inferior to a wooden clarinet. When such differences exist they
can be found to derive from differences in manufacturing intensity.

So to say, as did the note that drove me to remark in the first place,
that plastic clarinets are inherently deficient (and unspoken in the
remark was the suggestion that the plastic itself was inherently
inferior to wood) is establishing an elitist philosophy without
any technical evidence to back it up.

Plastic as a medium has never been established to be an inferior
material for the making of musical instruments. There may be
business reasons why manufacturers do not invest the time and
energy in their plastic instruments, but thus far no one has put
forward any technical reasons why such an effort would be doomed
to failure due to some deficiency in the material itself.

Some materials are inherently unsuited to clarinet manufacture:
chocolate, weed clippings, linoleum, possibly even kryptonite,
but there is no reason to conclude that plastic is one of them.

There was a young person who came on the list only last week who
said that she had to have a wooden clarinet, assuming that
whatever problems she was having were due to the plastic nature
of her instrument. Well, with that attitude, who knows if she would
achieve anything if she got a wooden clarinet.

This last case was not an example of elitism on her part because
she did not know, but the party who suggested it to her could be
so accused. How did he or she know what this young student needed?
Was it simply a rejection of her equipment because of the material
that was used to make it?

That's worse than elitism. It borders on the same kind of thinking
as racisim where only an external appearance is deemed to be
important.

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