Klarinet Archive - Posting 000145.txt from 2000/03

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: RE: [kl] Tony Pay's playing
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 20:27:44 -0500

On Sat, 4 Mar 2000 09:42:23 -0500, kkrelove@-----.com said:

> Tony,
>
> I've always wondered, with all the "Copy of Stradivarius" violins
> knocking around people's attics that play nothing like a real one, how
> we know that these copies of old clarinets really have anything like
> the playing characteristics of the originals.

Well, you can play the originals, and hear the differences -- relative
to your own way of playing, that is. The originals are usually better,
in my experience, when they're in good condition; though they're often
not, and you have to be careful they don't crack under the sudden
exposure to moisture and warmth. Liberal soaking in oil over a longish
period of time before playing is also a good idea, if you actually own
the instrument.

Bores warp and draw in over the years, of course, and if you want to
play an original you sometimes have to adust the bore with a reamer so
that the scale is correct for the sort of mouthpiece that is on the
instrument. Some people won't do that, of course, because they're
concerned about losing historical evidence. But I'd say that the sorts
of demands players of the time made on the accuracy of the scale is
likely to have been rather similar to the demands we make today.

And while you're right that we can't know exactly what the playing
characteristics of the instruments of the time were, to suggest that we
don't know whether those characteristics are 'anything like' what we can
achieve today is rather strong.

Anyway, we don't have all those old clarinet players knocking around to
play them for us. If I played on Reg Kell's old instruments, I'm sure
I'd sound nothing like him.

> Did any of the original players of these instruments leave behind any
> written instructions to the makers suggesting improvements, praising
> specific characteristics of specific instruments or complaining about
> problems like an unstable note or an unevenly tuned scale?

Not as far as I know on clarinets. There are fingering charts for
flutes, and to some extent for clarinets too, but I've always been
creative about fingerings myself, and would regard those suggestions
merely as a source of good ideas.

> Are there any production mysteries surrounding the old woodwinds to
> compare with the questions surrounding the old Italian violins? Like
> how the wood was prepared or how the bore might have been finished and
> treated by the original maker?

As far as I'm aware, not. But the violins are actually vibrating bodies
that transmit the sound directly. While clarinets, I'd say, do vibrate,
and their vibration has a second order effect on their playing
characteristics, they don't broadcast this vibration, so good physical
copying gets closer to the original. It's much more difficult to copy
vibrational characteristics because of differences in vibrational
behaviour between two dimensionally identical pieces of wood.

> Where would someone read about any of this (as opposed to simply
> reading key by key descriptions of the old instruments we have in
> museums)?

What I'd say is that most of the sorts of things that you can write down
aren't much use anyway, to me.

It depends what your context of enquiry is. I started to play old
instruments because I wanted to play a particular sort of music with
other people who were playing old instruments. It was pretty agonising
at first, but I started to get better at it.

Then, my context of enquiry was, what does the music seem to require in
order to come to life?

Notice that this is different from, how can I play like the players of
the past? This is a question which is notoriously difficult to answer
from written evidence. To support that, there is a fascinating and
frightening book called 'Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing
Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900-1950', by Robert Philip, CUP
1992. In this book, Philip shows how what *we* would imagine performers
did (judged by what they wrote and said about they did) is very
different from what they *actually* did on the recordings they made.

But being open to ideas and evidence (about what the music seems to
require in order to come to life) seemed the best first stance, and
those ideas included not only how other people played other old
instruments, but also some of the characteristics of the instrument I
was using.

But not *all*; the fact that a particular note is weak on my instrument
and the music wants it strong is something that requires me to follow
the music rather than my instrument. The instrument is just a *tool*,
you see.

Anyhow, this is just to say that I play on those instruments in order to
find out what *I* think are the best things about them, and then use
those 'best' things in the service of the music. I don't play on them
in order to have them be some sort of yardstick for determining what
things are the best, whatever that might mean.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE www.gmn.com/artists/welcome.asp
tel/fax 01865 553339

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