Klarinet Archive - Posting 000750.txt from 1998/07

From: Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.Net>
Subj: [kl] Bb3/C3 trill and trills generally
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1998 09:26:23 -0400

The current discussion of alternate fingerings fascinates me, because they
are one of my passions, and I'm afraid I sometimes have my students
practice them to the point of rebellion.

While I'm sure there is a world of clarinet methods and exercise books out
there that I've never seen, the best treatment of trills and alternate
fingerings for them I know of is in Klose's Celebrated Method. Hyacinthe
Klose wrote it originally to demonstrate the superiority of the
Boehm-Buffet-Klose mechanism to that of all the other systems known at that
time, and the first page of music in it is 30 fingerbusters that he, in
effect, dared the players of other systems to attempt.

Next come nine pages of "trills and shakes and the various fingerings for
their production," an exhaustive treatment of the subject. Trills were much
more common in music of the 18th and 19th centuries, and some of them were
hard to do on pre-Boehm clarinets, Once again, Hyacinthe is showing off.

Further along in Book One are the 114 "Practical exercises upon passages
which are only executed with difficulty on the 13 keyed clarinet ...",
which I, and I believe many other teachers, continue to use even if our
primary choice of a method is some newer and better-organized one.

I think M. Klose's book should be in every serious student's library.

Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.net>

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