Klarinet Archive - Posting 001049.txt from 2000/03

From: David Blumberg <reedman@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] re: Reed Vibration
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 16:27:24 -0500

Jonathan wrote:
Many orchestra players around the world, prefer to make the clarinet into a
dull monotonic instrument, and therefore control there setup, lip and
blowing pressure to avoid ever reaching the "reed-hitting" point. They
tend to:
* Play on hard reeds (which also generate a large amount of white
noise)
* Use mouthpieces with small openings and low Bernoulli forces
* And they never play above "mf"
As an aside, there is large contingent of people who have been misguided
into thinking that the white noise generated by too-hard reeds generates a
somehow "darker" sound. This, of course, is poppycock. White noise is,
very simply, noise -- an undesirable random, and annoying sound.
However, if you would like to truly make the clarinet sing with a wide
range of dynamics and a widely varied tonal pallette, the only way to do it
is to make use of the full range of the reeds "striking" possibilities!
-----------------------------
Jonathan Cohler
cohler@-----.net

----------------------

Jonathan, I highly respect your opinion, but what you wrote about the
Orchestral Clarinetist just doesn't make sense to me. Far as I'm concerned,
a player who doesn't play above MF, and has noise when playing softly is
not a good player - period! I certainly wouldn't want to hear them on a
recording.
Are you talking about Community Orchestra players?
I can't think of any solo recordings out there that sound that bad, but
there probably are.

David Blumberg
music@-----.com
http://www.mp3.com/mytempo
http://www.mytempo.com
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