Klarinet Archive - Posting 000604.txt from 1998/10

From: "Christina K. Loy" <secondtimearound@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] (no subject)
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 11:05:16 -0400

I began playing in September 1960 using some kind of silver or metal clarinet that
was slightly bent and had a nasty mouthpiece and brown slimy pads. It was a
school horn. You really had to struggle to get anything out of it. That
Christmas I received a B&H plastic clarinet newly rented by my parents from a
local music store. Boy, did I feel privileged to get it. For my birthday five
months later, my mother purchased an Evette & Schaeffer Buffet that had been
rented for only three months at the same music store. I played it until my last
day of high school. Fearing that it would be stolen from my locker, I left it in
the school's locked humidity controlled band room closet until I left in the
afternoon. I discovered that it had, in fact, been stolen from there! I have
always hoped that it split into two the next day. I really have missed it all
these years.

Jack, this particular high school was North of SLUH by a few miles, at the corner
of Kingshighway and Arsenal(?)

Lelia (notice, my spelling has improved) I was in first grade when Sputnik I. was
launched, blissfully unaware. I had more important things to occupy my time. My
first grade teacher was more terrorizing than anything the Russians could have
launched! She wore those black lace shoes with the little holes in the toes and
low heels. She rapped our knuckles with a wooden ruler on a minutely basis. She
was at least 157 years old and her name was Miss Wueldermuth. No wonder I turned
out the way I did!

Christina

LeliaLoban@-----.com wrote:

> 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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