Klarinet Archive - Posting 000940.txt from 2000/08

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl]Which one? (Uh-oh...newby alert!)
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 18:00:09 -0400

Mike Selvey wrote,
>The deal set up by the school district is to attend a showing of
>instruments put on at a hotel by a local music company, and view the ONE
>clarinet which has been "recommended" by the district and the music
>store together as our best choice. It will be in the nature of the
>standard Lease/Purchase agreement of 18 months. The price of this
>"school band discount" Signet-110 is $899.00! I almost had a cardiac
>arrest!

[snip]
>Any other practical advice for someone in my postion (i.e. "Is a
>carry-all case preferable to a standard hard case for a sixth-grader?)
>would also be welcome!

I'm not sure exactly what a carry-all case is, but if it's a soft-sided gig
bag, IMHO you would be much better off with a hard case for a wooden
clarinet. Wooden clarinets are fragile. Serious damage is just about
guaranteed with a gig bag in the hands of a grade school kid. Of course, the
hard case makes a much better blunt instrument, too. You wouldn't want her
to go to school inadequately armed. :-)

Maybe your daughter is an unusually civilized child in a particularly nice
neighborhood, but it takes some time for the average no-neck monster, oops, I
mean delicate young lady, to learn to be kind to a clarinet, not to use it as
a baseball bat, not to whonk other kids upside the head with it, not to use
it as a cattle-prod for gridlock in the band room door, not to poke it
beak-first down a hole in the ground to see how far it will go and then root
it around to see if there's a snake down there, etc..

That explanation of why the school band director recommends children *start*
with wooden clarinets sounds unconvincing to me. Does this sweetheart deal
with The Music Man involve some sort of deliciously irresistible kickback?
More than 40 years ago, the parents at my grade school discovered that my
band teacher had made such an arrangement, for a low-cost, low-quality
plastic student instrument. The store got a quantity discount for supplying
the band with a truckload of these cheap sticks, and the band director got a
nice cut of the profit to supplement his disgustingly low salary. When the
parents found out, the uproar almost cost the band director his job. I think
the moral of the story is that school districts ought to pay band teachers a
living wage -- but I suspect he thought the moral of the story was that next
time he'd better be more careful to whom he bragged about his extracurricular
deals for supplementary income....

Surely you don't mean that the whole school district is in on this contract
*officially*? Is your school board elected? Does the neighborhood *prefer*
to be dictated to in this manner?

I'm sort of kidding, but not totally. It makes sense that the school
wouldn't want the parents to go out in their well-intentioned ignorance and
buy heaven knows what sorts of miserable clarinet- shaped objects, but why
not recommend several acceptable instruments with a bit of a price range, so
that parents of different economic strata could make some reasonable
decisions? This whole set-up does smell a bit like the bottom of the fishing
creel.

Lelia

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe from Klarinet, e-mail: klarinet-unsubscribe@-----.org
Subscribe to the Digest: klarinet-digest-subscribe@-----.org
Additional commands: klarinet-help@-----.org
Other problems: klarinet-owner@-----.org