Klarinet Archive - Posting 000104.txt from 1998/08

From: Martin Pergler <pergler@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Clarinet dislikes hot summer?
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 20:28:34 -0400

This repeats itself year after year. I happily play my clarinet
1-3 hrs a day all year. No trouble. Then I go to a music
camp over the summer and play 6-8 hours a day for 2 weeks.
A heat wave comes along (upper 90s, humid). My clarinet
becomes very stuffy, hard to articulate in the clarion
register, very sharp in the high B and C range, and the
altissimo next to impossible to produce. No obvious leaks,
pads appear reasonably well seated, the pinned crack does not
appear to be opening up (all just layman's observations).
Then a cold front goes through (with a doozy of a thunderstorm)
and everything is marvelous again.

Now if it were *I* (the human being) having trouble playing
under these conditions, I'd say "no wonder". But since it's
the clarinet (an inanimate object) I wonder why and what I can
do to fix it. Other people have trouble with their instruments too,
but not *nearly* as much...I can play their clarinets (and even sometimes
end up borrowing their instr for performances) and they can't
play mine.

Any ideas? Thanks, Martin

Once I took the instr to a repair tech once I got back. It worked
wonderfully in the shop and we didn't figure anything out.
It's a 10 year old Buffet R13 Bb. My A is fine.

-------------------------------------------------------
Martin Pergler pergler@-----.edu
Grad student, Mathematics http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~pergler
Univ. of Chicago

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