Klarinet Archive - Posting 000762.txt from 1999/01

From: TOM RIDENOUR <klarinet@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] R13
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 05:47:54 -0500

>What I shared about the R-13 was not just subjective, pejorative
>statements, but ones which are founded in hard core acoustics and are
>empiracally demonstrable.
>
>
>Dear Tom,
>
>Whose acoustic opinion are you basing your facts on?
>If the R13 was that accousticly inferior ,it would not be played by the
>majority of professionel musician in North America and Japan.
>
>Musically Yours
>
>Francois KLoc
>Woodwind Product Specialist
>Boosey & Hawkes Musical Instruments Inc.
>
Well,
Of course, you know the majority of American's think Clinton is doing a
good job too. But is the majority always right, and do they do and think
what they do and think for the right reasons?
I'm not sure they always do.
Francois, I have played and examined hundreds of Buffet R-13 clarinets over
a period of almost 30 years now, played them for 25 years, taught the
instrument in university for 15 years, and worked with scores of wonderful
players to help correct the faults that frustrated them in their clarinets.
I assure you the things I stated are not only my privately held opinion,
but the opinion of many and increasing numbers of players; nor is my
opinion an uninformed one.
Many of my statements regarding the tuning defects and responsive
qualitites have been echoed by Lee Gibson for almost 20 years in various
articles in the clarinets magazine.
Plus, I hear and have heard a lot of Buffet players play, both live and on
recordings, and my general impression, however talented they may be and
whatever virtures they may exhibit in their playing, is that they are
working much too hard physically to achieve the results they do, and this
can't help but in some degree diminish the expressiveness of their
performance. And some things always stand out as toublesome to me, most
especially the thin high tones which get harsher and brighter as the
dynamic level rises. This, to me , is a serious defect, because it make
non-clarinet players dislike the instrument because of what they assume is
an uncorrectable defect.
There is no doubt that the R-13 has had something to offer the clarinet
world, and those things we need to appreciate; but without pretending it
is the sine qua non. It has many, many problems. I played the instrument
for years, accepted it and built a whole pedagogy around its' inequities.
I thought, as many do, that that was just the way clarinets _had_ to play
and respond.
I was wrong.

R-13's play very different one to another. We all know that. But as I
said in my previous post, certain general features, both good and bad,
standout as common.
I recall when I was at Leblanc and doing presentations on the instruments I
designed, most of the players I presented the instrument to were Buffet
R-13 players.
Often I would ask them as a group, "What happens to the resistance of your
clarinets when you play from this note to this? or this area to this? or
the tuning when you do this?."...and they would almost tell me in unison
chorus what happens. How could they have done this if their instruments
had not had certain common features?
So my opinion is my opnion, of course, but it is not an uninformed,
subjective one. It is one that is formed with a very broad experience with
the R-13 and other clarinets in a whole variety of contexts and on a whole
variety of levels; a richness and breadth of experience I could NEVER have
gained had I been only subjectively involved in just developing my own
playing and teaching in an isolate circumstances, or working to "make
performance" for the next set of subscription concerts.

I am not trying to put anybody or anything down here; but I am trying to
draw attention to the fact that clarinetists don't have to be passive and
docile.
Nor am I saying the Buffet is aweful and what we did at Leblanc was
perfect. That's ridiculous.
What I am saying is that there were real quantifiable improvements we
designed in the Concerto clarinets, and we gave players a real choice,
perhaps for the first time.

It is true than many players play the R-13. But the reasons they do are of
most interest to me. There is no room or time to speak of it here, but it
is my opinion that the plurality that exists, does so for a variety of
reasons, not because it is objectively the best, or because of musical
values and acoustics; conditioning, politics, peer pressure, years of
establishment on the market, habitual mind set that fears change, and the
realities of music store economics are only a few of the other reasons that
often play a part in one's decisions.
Finally, there is a lot of dissatisfaction among players. Tonight I spoke
to a good and knowledgable clarinet professor at a university about a
variety of subjects. He complained of upper clarion sharpness in his R-13,
that he has live with it for years, and said that if he tried to perfect
the tuning of the upper clarion his left hand chalumeau F and E would drop
unbearably flat.
I told him I could correct the problem and that he did not have to live
with it. We both noted that the problem did not exist in the Concerto
clarinet, for instance, and certainly does not in the new Selmer Signature.
People live with a lot of stuff because they don't think they have any
alternative.
And until recently they have not. The manufacturers have not, until
recently, given an answer to the R-13, but many are now and it is good to
see and good for clarinet playing.
Let us not confuse the staus quo with the sine qua non; that's apples and
oranges again; in a dynamic, relative and existential universe there is
always room for improvement, difference and another and perhaps much better
way to skin a cat.

tom

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