Klarinet Archive - Posting 000543.txt from 1998/08

From: Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@-----.net>
Subj: RE: Re: [kl] A nasty question about Buffet
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 12:38:50 -0400

>>I immediately called William McColl, my teacher (who was also the best
>>repair person in Seattle at that time--he's done a great deal of hands-on
>>research). He told me not to tell anyone, but wait a half hour and then put
>>the top joint in the refrigerator. Sure enough--10 minutes later, unstuck,
>>uncracked horn. We then proceeded to sand the interior of the barrel to
>>free it up.
>>
>Which goes to show you that wood clarinets SHOULD be able to survive a
>little more than we give them credit for. If not, my 27 year-old,
>uncracked Selmer should be crumbled into raw material for Greenlines by
>now! :-)

So there's me with 1957-vintage Centered Tone. With new pads and some key
polishing and adjustments, it looks and plays like it came from the
factory. Not a crack or a pin on the thing. Did I get lucky or has the
technology and/or the wood itself changed? From 1991, when I inherited the
instrument, to the end of 1997, when I got it fixed and started to PLAY it,
it sat peacefully in a hardshell case it would cost me a month's income to
replace, exposed to baseboard heat, AC, and then to extremes of summer and
winter. The guys in Ohio who repaired it were all oo-ing and ah-ing over
the horn, like they were a bunch of guys in a brothel who'd found the last
surviving virgin:-). It never occurred to me that an instrument would
self-destruct unless it were abused.

Then I remembered the instrument I had from Junior High through college.
It was some offbrand French model, I'm pretty sure (from the looks of it),
that it was unstained grenadilla (there were reddish streaks visible), it
cost all of $77 bucks in 1957 or '58. I thought this was hard to believe
until I found out that you could buy a new R13 back then for under $200.
So I guess it was a low-end student or intermediate wood clarinet; but it
also spent a LOT of time in a repair shop on 8th Avenue in the upper 40s,
long since vanished, because it needed pinning, pads, key adjustments, and
just about everything, all from normal schoolkid use. I suppose it was,
whatever brand it might have been, a piece of junk.

Ken

"The East River. But it was not a river at all. Merely a column of water
connecting the upper harbor to the Sound. Yet everyone called it a river.
They chose not to think about it. They clung to the surface of things."
--Peter Quinn, "Banished Children of Eve"
Ken Wolman kwolman@-----.com/SoHo/Gallery/1649

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