Klarinet Archive - Posting 000535.txt from 2001/03

From: "David C. Kumpf" <dkumpf@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] : Re: [kl] Martin Freres clarinet
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 19:16:24 -0500

Thanks for sending this on (I had seen it in the Klarinet archives),and
thanks to all on the list who replied to my inquiry. At the moment, I am
still looking...will probably pass on the Martin Freres instrument.

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: Rien Stein [mailto:rstein@-----.nl]
Subject: [kl] : Re: [kl] Martin Freres clarinet

Maybe it is a somewhat slow reaction to David C. Kumpf's mail , yet I want
to give it.

Dear Martin

The instrument you bought, must have been on some ceiling many years: the
Martin Freres Company in Paris - as far as my knowledge goes: in clarinet
making the only one - ceased to exist already before World War II, in 1936.
My bass clarinet is from that factory, and I found about it with help of
several instrumental collections all over the world, when I tried to
discover its age (1896).

The way I came to the instrument maybe is worth while to be told here:

Some eight or nine years ago I was in a bus, sitting next to an old lady. We
talked a bit together, and somehow i told her music is the one and great
love in my life, apart from what I feel for my wife and children, and I
actually would never have married the girl that now is my wife, had she ever
tried to forbid me to play the clarinet. So the lady said: You play the
clarinet? My husband was a clarint player with the Utrecht Symphony
Orchestra. He is dead now some twenty years, but on my ceiling I still have
a case with one of his instruments, maybe you want to see it?" Of course I
was eager to see it. So we went to her house and she showed it to me, it
was this Freres Martin bass clarinet. She asked me hether I could use, and
as I said "Yes", she wanted to give it to me, but I took her and the
instrument to my repairman/dealer, and wanted to pay her for the instrument.
She didn't want any maney, and it took me a lot of talking to convince her
to take at least some money for it. Her only desire was that sometimes I
would play the instrument for her, but alas only two weeks after that she
died.

When you play the instrument you will know immediately it is a very old
instrument, it sounds like. But I love it. In the band in Zeist I play I was
able to get me a brandnew Leblanc bass, which I played in the band, but at
home I somehow always preferred to study on "Opa", (Grandpa), as I use to
call my instrument. The Leblanc in the band is now played by someone else,
but still at least once a week I play my old bass. At this moment I almost
have completed the third volume of the famous Arban method for ...
euphonium. I use this method mainly to get as used to playing the bass clef
as the soprano clef. And, funnily enough: playing the bass clef on a bass
clarinet is no problem to me, but to play the same pieces in the same clef
on my A- or B-flat almost is like reading Chinese.

Rien

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