Klarinet Archive - Posting 000331.txt from 2002/12

From: Roger Shilcock <roger.shilcock@-----.uk>
Subj: Re: [kl] bass clarinet in A
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 04:31:07 -0500

That wasn't enxactly my point, but it was worth saying.
In fact, the reason for not using the bass clarinet was totally non-musical -
there was no space....
We are an amatuer group, and had oodles of rehearsal time. All the clarinet parts
we had seem to been re-written by hand, and I suspect the copyist simply
assumed that certain passages in certain keys required an A or a B flat
instrument, that (unusually!) it took an amazing length of time to change
instruments,
and that all bass clarinettists expected their parts to be for
a B flat instrument in the treble clef, all the time.
Roger S.

In message <93.27867e10.2b2a13f7@-----.org writes:
> 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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>
>

--
Cet animal est méchant. Quand on l'attaque, il se défend.
---- Alleged sign in French zoo.

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