Klarinet Archive - Posting 000288.txt from 2002/08

From: Audrey Travis <vsofan@-----.ca>
Subj: [kl] Paris was wonderful!
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 10:28:38 -0400

Hi everyone!
I just got home from 10 glorious days in Paris where I immersed myself
in both art and music history - the Louvre (3 times), the Picasso, Rodin
and Eugene Delacroix Museums, the Museum of Modern Art, the Musee
d'Orsay and a fabulous Music Museum, which I visited twice. Not having
really delved very much into art before, I am impressed by the wealth of
art available and found some immediate favourites such as Rubens,
Delacroix, Picasso, Rodin sculptures, Boticelli (his halos are so
delicate - like gossamer wings), Raphael, Francesco de Rimini, David and
Da Vinci (although I was singularly unimpressed by the Mona Lisa at the
Louvre). An Art History course is certainly on my to-do list for this
year if I can find one locally.

I fell in love with the Music Museum. Hundreds of wonderful instruments
beautifully preserved and displayed in glass cases with explanation (in
French only) beside each one. They give you a headset and as you move
from one display case to the next, the explanations (available in
English) and wonderful musical examples come forth to demonstrate the
instrument and its history. There were harpsichords, richly painted,
lutes, mandolons, guitars with wonderful shapes and beautiful
adornments, serpents, flutes of glass, wood and metal, amazing recorders
and oboes (one of which looks like a mini basson - there was also a
clarinet very similarly shaped), bassoons, a rich variety of clarinets
and bass clarinets, violins (Stradivarius) of different shapes and sizes
(one called a 'pouchette' which was about 10-12 inches high but in the
shape of a very narrow, elongated violin). Can anyone tell me more
about this? There were trumpets of many shapes, some with 3 pistons on
top but two below (separated) that must have been played by the left
hand fingers, one with a complete ram's horn after the mouthpiece cup
and before the bell, french horns with about 10 pipes coming down off
the lead pipe, a wonderful variety of bass horns by Adolphe Sax and
others that seem to me to be precursors of our present day euphoniums
and tubas, instruments that look like very fat-tubed tubas with
saxophone-like key covers and a brass mouthpiece and so much more. I
was in seventh heaven and returned to try to get some pictures, bot no
flash was allowed. Unfortunately, the slow shutter speed made all my
shots blurry and unusable.

My intent was to use these shots to show my band students that the
instruments in use today are only part of an ongoing creative process in
the world of music and that this will certainly continue in the future.
Questions would also be raised regarding why some of these instruments
died out and what might kinds of instrumental changes might be created
in the future. By the way, these are 10-12 year olds. Any ideas you
might have of further developing this unit would be welcome.

Does anyone know of an online source that might have a wealth of
pictures like these which could be downloaded? Certainly, I will search
libraries, including our School of Music at Univ. of B.C., but would
appreciate your help very much.

Thanks!

Audrey

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