Klarinet Archive - Posting 000600.txt from 1998/10

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] (no subject)
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 10:25:01 -0400

James P Reed wrote:
>>If a child starting to play a clarinet was to have gotten a used silver
plated or metal clarinet in 1957 or 1958, what would the good models have
been? And, do you have any ideas of what they would have cost used? This may
seem a little esoteric but I'm making my first foray into fiction (outside of
the fictions I've lived) and it's a trivial detail >I'd like to accurately
build in for my main character.>>

Edwin V. Lacy replied,
>>>Well, let's see. I started playing in 1949, and my Pan American resonite
(plastic) clarinet cost about $125. Even then, in the part of the world where
I lived, there were no metal clarinets available which were regarded as "good
models." .... If the student in your literary work actually had to play on a
metal clarinet, he or she would have been alternately pitied and ridiculed.>>>

Yes indeed. When metal clarinets fell out of fashion, they fell WAY out, in
what may have been an overreaction. I started playing clarinet in 1957, the
year of Sputnik I. My public school band teacher (in California) gave a
recruiting talk at the beginning of that school year in which he stressed that
kids shouldn't let their parents go out and buy unapproved instruments. (My
father did that anyway, after he found out about the school's sweetheart deal
with a local music store promoting the teacher-recommended plastic Bundy. Dad
rebelled, saved up, went to a store in San Francisco and bought me a wooden
Conn, a better instrument, although it didn't fit into the sound of the
ensemble -- not that fitting in really counted for much in a crowd of
beginners honking and squealing.) The teacher thoroughly abused the entire
idea of metal clarinets in emphasizing that students should particularly avoid
those. One kid did show up to the first day of band class with an old metal
clarinet from the family attic. The TEACHER led the jeering section. I don't
mean to make the teacher sound gratuitously cruel. That kid was attractive
and well- liked, the kind who could take some teasing without wanting to crawl
away and kill himself; and he didn't come from a low-income family, as the
teacher probably realized. Anyhow, amusing ourselves by torturing a classmate
beat the pleasures of the duck-and-cover drills. "Crawl under your desk,
close your eyes, curl up in a ball, grasp your ankles with both hands, tuck
your head between your knees . . . and kiss your ass goodbye."

Someone raised her hand and asked, "What do we do if there's an air raid siren
while we're in band class? We don't have any desks in here."

The teacher rolled his eyes and laughed. "You really think duck-and-cover is
gonna do you any good when we're sitting right across the highway from a Nike
Missile site? When we've got Hamilton Air Force Base a couple of miles
farther up the road? We're at Ground Zero here, kiddies. You hear the siren
in band class, you stand up, play the Star Spangled Banner real loud and hope
it's just another drill."

The boy's parents soon bought him another clarinet. I don't believe I ever
saw another metal clarinet in all my years in the California public school
music programs. I write fiction, too, and to my mind, the fact that metal
clarinets were anathema in the late 1950s would make for much better fictional
possibilities than if your character owned what we considered a good-quality
horn; but then I write horror!

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Do you remember where you were when the Russians launched Sputnik I? Terror .
. . often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are
in the unmaking."
--Stephen King, _Danse Macabre_.
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