Klarinet Archive - Posting 000294.txt from 2002/12

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] bass clarinet in A
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 11:31:51 -0500

Roger Shilcock wrote,
>>>When a group I play with was asked to play for "La Boheme,"
>>>we eventually did without the bass clarinet - I remember the
>>>part as being one of those I referred to, though, with anything
>>>up to seven flats in the key signature.

I wrote,
>> Thank you for confirming my suspicion that, confronted with something
>> ridiculous, professional musicians are as likely as anybody else to say,
"To
>> hell with this!"

Daniel Leeson wrote,
>Lelia, what is it that you find "ridiculous" here?

For one thing, I think it's ridiculous to ask pit musicians to read music on
the fly in the key of C-flat major or A-flat minor. It's all very well to
say that musicians *should* be able to read any key. That's fine if there's
plenty of rehearsal time -- but the practical reality is that professional
pit orchestras rarely get ample rehearsals, and extremely unusual key
signatures mean wrong notes.

I'm not surprised that Roger Shilcock's group left out or substituted for the
B-flat bass clarinet confronted with a part like that (probably on short
notice, too). Even with enough advance warning to take the part home, I
don't think it would be worth the trouble to re-spell the score into B major
or G-sharp minor, because IMHO it's as easy to remember to flat *everything*
while sight-transposing as it is to read in B. And then there's the whole
other issue of trying to play a clarinet *in tune* in a remote key signature.
Whether it's 7 flats or 5 sharps, that's expecting a lot from the instrument
as well as the musician. It's a good test for a competition or an exam, but
I think it's ridiculous to expect that much in a pit orchestra, since pit
orchestras are chronically under-rehearsed and the composer never can tell
what the quality of the changing personnel might be from year to year. And
of course Roger Shilcock said he saw *up to* seven flats. If it's G-flat
with 6 flats, it's not a big help to re-spell the score into F-sharp with 6
sharps, and it's probably going to sound sour either way.

I did have one uncle, Bill Van Ess, an organist, who not only could read any
key up to speed with the greatest of ease, but could sight-transpose from
anything to anything with equal aplomb. He would sight-read something in the
original key with his left hand, while transposing into another key with his
right hand and into a third key with his feet, as a parlor trick. (He
delighted in choosing keys that were, for instance, a minor second down and a
minor seventh down from the original.) Other relatives used to hand him
"black note panic" scores, the most complex they could find, to try to trip
him. We would divvy up who monitored each foot and hand, to try to catch him
in a mistake. He won a fair amount of pocket change that way. But of course
he didn't have to hold the keyboards on pitch as he played on them.

If we're talking about wind players with normal abilities, which is better,
the sound of many notes falling on the floor, or a part missing? If the
first violin part is awkwardly written, then tough luck. The violinist is
stuck with it and so is the audience. However, the bass clarinet part often
is covered, doubled somewhere. I think composers (or their elves who do the
part-copying) should be reasonable, that's all.

I love the sound of the bass clarinet, and I can understand that a composer
might hear that sound in his/her head and *want* it, but, quoth Mick Jagger
or whoever wrote that lyric for him, you can't always get what you want. Is
bass clarinet *really* the only instrument that will serve the composer's
need in the key of A? Couldn't the cellos play that part? Couldn't a horn
in F play it, in the key of E? Okay, maybe not... ;-) But I would rather
not hear a bass clarinet struggle with intonation in the key of B; and
notating an extracted part in C-flat carries transpositional purity to an
extreme that really is ridiculous. My 2 cents.

Lelia

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