Klarinet Archive - Posting 000681.txt from 2000/11

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Poor Man's A Clarinet
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 18:17:53 -0500

I've lost track of who said what, but someone asked who first proposed the
idea of dangling string down a clarinet to lower the pitch by narrowing the
bore. Different people thought that perhaps Jack Brymer or Robert Willaman
had described this procedure. I looked through Willaman's _The Clarinet and
Clarinet Playing_, revised edition (Carl Fischer,1954). This edition has an
extended (descriptive) table of contents, but no index. Since he covers
pitch and intonation in several contexts, I leafed through the entire book.
I may have missed something, but I couldn't find anything about dangling a
string down the bore.

Jack Brymer's _Clarinet_ has an index, but since he also deals with
intonation and pitch in various contexts, I leafed through that book, too
(first American edition, Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides,1977; the first edition
was 1976) and found nothing in there, either. He wrote another book, _From
Where I Sit_, about his life as a professional clarinet player. I don't have
that book. Maybe he said something about the string in there.

I did find a brief mention of the technique in David Pino, _The Clarinet and
Clarinet Playing_ (1983 Scribner's trade paperback edition), p. 215. This
paragraph appears in the context of discussing various attempts to
manufacture a convertible clarinet:

>The most amusing attempt of all to make a combination
>clarinet occurred in the early 1900s. Someone got the
>bright idea of simply dropping a length of string into the
>bore of a B-flat clarinet, hooking it onto the shoulder of
>the barrel joint with two little metal hooks, and ending up
>with a clarinet that blew so 'flat' that it played in A. The
>string was about 15 inches long and had the approximate
>thickness of the average rope-type clothesline, and it did
>indeed lower the pitch of the clarinet a half step. When I
>was in high school, my band director gave me a string-tuning
>device which he had had for a number of years, as a sort of
>curiosity. I still have it, and to this day it occasionally affords
>me and my students a good laugh. As might be expected, a
>clarinet with a clothesline in its bore blows like, well, a clarinet
>with a clothesline in its bore.

It's an amusing description, though I wish he had explained where the metal
hooks attached, and how. Also, I'm not sure how he imagines his readers will
imagine a clarinet with a clothesline in its bore sounds. Unfortunately, he
gives no source for the information that someone (who?) came up with the idea
of using the string in the early 1900s, so alas, we're no farther forward.

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~
McCarthy's Law: Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to
be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's
important.
~~~~~~~~~

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