Klarinet Archive - Posting 000531.txt from 1998/08

From: <CEField@-----.com>
Subj: Re: Re: Re: [kl] A nasty question about Buffet
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 12:38:38 -0400

In my next life, I plan to do a thorough analysis and compilation of these
data...

For the time being, though, it would appear that, if an R13 is going to crack,
the newest ones (mid to late 90s) are the more likely candidates. This
observation underscores what Mr. Brannen (?) and another repairman (not sure
whom, sorry) alluded to. Perhaps the quality of the wood is to blame. Newer
stock with more water content. More sapwood than heartwood. Not completely
dried before milling, drilling, or whatever it is they do to make clarinets.
Or maybe dried too fast. Perhaps Mr. Kloc can elucidate on the reasons WHY
Boosey & Hawkes even began making the Greenlines. Did someone at the company
foresee that the newer stocks of grenadilla were substandard? (This is a
hypothetical question. I am not saying that the newer stocks are substandard.)
Or was environmental concern/wastage the only reason behind the development of
the Greenline clarinets?

Another factor that I don't think has been addressed is the fact that parents
are actually buying R13s for K-12 students nowadays. It concerns me that a
youngster might not know how to care properly for a wood clarinet. If you have
seen the way kids mangle bridge mechanisms and wrench their instruments apart,
it would not surprise me to learn that a lot of broken tenons, at least, are
caused by clueless clarinetists (say THAT fast 10 times).

I don't know when this trend began but when I was a kid (here we go again),
you were lucky to get a hand-me-down clarinet from a relative or a used
instrument from the neighborhood music store. Today, by contrast, I am told
that some high school band directors "require" (maybe too strong a term but
close to the truth) their students to have R13s. Could the sheer numbers of
newer R13s in the hands of relatively inexperience youth be responsible for
some of the cracking? Do band directors and teachers SHOW kids how to break in
their instruments gently?

Cindy, Ph.D. in Crackology (or is that Ph.D. Crackpot?)

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