Klarinet Archive - Posting 000320.txt from 1999/05

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Using one clarinet place of another
Date: Sun, 9 May 1999 23:31:01 -0400

It seems to me that one of the parties who must bear the responsibility
for inculcating clarinetists into the belief that which clarinet you
use doesn't really matter has to be the German music publisher, Breitkopf
& Hartel.

Beggining in the latter part of the last century, they began to print
their orchestral parts with the original and the transposed version
included in a single part. They did this so as to increase sales
to amateur orchestras where the clarinetists may not have had the
A or C clarinet.

So the Beethoven 7, for example, has both the A clarinet part and,
following it, a part that says, "Transposed version for B-flat
clarinet." I think that probably the first time I saw such a thing
when I was 12 or 13, I thought that Beethoven himself had actually
prepared both parts.

"What a nice guy," was my thought. And from that point, it is a
short road to hell.

Even worse sometimes, one would find a part in the Strauss waltzes
which would say "Clarinet in B-flat (Original for C clarinet)" and
I once again presumed that Strauss sanctioned and approved this
printing. After a while, every publisher took up this cudgel, but
B&H were the first.

Kalmus, by copying everything that B&H produced, perpetuated the
problem and even compounded by providing clarinet parts for basset
horns as is the case with their edition of the Gran Partitta (which
was then copied by Barenreiter who does the same thing with their
edition).

I am going to suggest tenor sax parts as substitutes for the clarinets
in the Mozart E-flat symphony. The idea is kind of kinky but what
the hell, basset horn, basset hound, tenor sax. Big deal. It doesn't
really matter as long as you get the pitches of the notes correct.
Right?

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================

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