Klarinet Archive - Posting 000748.txt from 2000/05

From: Spike Spiegel <jnohe@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: [kl] Tone and its perception
Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 18:48:08 -0400

On Mon, 15 May 2000, Claudia Zornow wrote:

> David Hattner wrote, in a list of flaws of orchestral clarinet
> audition candidates:
>
> > #5 Tone quality. Not a specific problem but a general one. Unattractive vs.
> > attractive.
<snip>
> So what do you do? When I'm playing in an orchestra, how can I tell
> what I need to change to improve my sound?
>
> What do the rest of you do?

This is not always the player - a lot of it is the hall. The reason they
sound as good as the next guy here and spectacular from the audience's
perspective is simply what the hall can do to the sound. Depending on how
it is designed, a hall can amplify particular frequency ranges while
dampening (heck, even BURYING) other ranges. The Colorado Springs
Convention Center, when I played it 6 years back, did a very nice job of
dampening very high pitches, which kept our first clarinets, flutes and
pic from really sticking out. However, Popejoy Hall, in Albuquerque NM,
more or less balances the ensemble evenly, but if you're not careful, can
muddle up the middle range sound (horn, 3rd clarinet, bass clarinet, sax).

The best thing you can do is play the hall ahead of time to find out how
it affects your sound ahead of time (ie, in a rehearsal sometime before
the performance). If you are a soloist, and you find your sound changing,
you may have to use a harder or softer reed, or change the stick of the
piano. If you're an ensemble, you may find that particular sections will
either need to play out or back off more than usual, and very often
accompanying dynamic adjustment is articulation adjustment as well. In
the Centennial Hall in Tucson, Arizona, our ensemble discovered that our
staccatos would have to be significantly shorter, and our legato
articulation had to be crisper to be heard.

There could be more one could do - but I can't think of much else at the
moment...summer vacation forces the brain to turn off...

J. Shouryu Nohe
http://web.nmsu.edu/~jnohe
Professor of SCSM102, New Mexico State Univ.
"I don't know, and I don't have an opinion." - Jet Black

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