Klarinet Archive - Posting 000351.txt from 2002/12

From: Karl Krelove <karlkrelove@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] bass clarinet in A
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 23:47:12 -0500

Sorry, I wasn't watching this thread, so I'm not sure how it got started
(did it grow from the person's post who wanted to know about getting Fiddler
parts ahead of time?), but there are other possibilities here.

The major rental companies that I've dealt with in setting up our student
show at school each summer send the music so that you get it a month in
advance of the first performance. Of course, that doesn't mean it's in the
players' hands then, but delays from that point can be the result of a
communication bottleneck between the players and the person who is
responsible for getting the music to them.

By the way, to combat most of the problems Patricia describes, a lot of
shows are now coming with brand new parts that are computer generated and
bound much more cheaply than the old oversized, hand-inscribed and
photocopied books that used to come in the heavy brown covers with heavy
cloth tape over sewn bindings. Most of the last several we've done have been
fresh copies made on 8.5" x 11" paper with a surface that comes off if you
use any kind of tape to hold inserts and a glued binding like a paperback
book. I really suspect that they toss them after one or two times out. We've
gotten these from both Tams-Witmark and Samuel French. It beats getting the
overmarked and undererased ones I can remember trying to read when I was
younger.

Of course, the paper is lighter and in those bindings it can be hard to make
them stay open. I'm playing for a production of Annie this weekend with a
book that is bound in such a way that it can't lie flat, so I'm fighting a
closing book the whole night. And talk about bad keys! Why would anyone
write tune after tune in E and B (concert pitch - resulting in my
clarinet-tenor-bass clarinet book being constantly in F# and C#)? How much
of a vocal problem could it have caused to move them either down or up a
half-step?

Or at the very least the engraver could have written the C# tunes in D-flat.
Maybe it would have sounded too dark in flats...

Karl Krelove

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patricia A. Smith [mailto:patricia@-----.net]
> Sent: Friday, December 13, 2002 8:48 PM
> To: klarinet@-----.org
> Subject: Re: [kl] bass clarinet in A
>
>
> Gary Van Cott wrote:
> > I am not really an expert here, but I believe the books for these shows
> > are typically rentals that often show up at the last possible moment.
>
>
> I have had just enough experience here to answer this - yes, rather
> often. Other times, here are some other possibilities -
>
> 1- the parts are so OLD, they are partially decomposed, hence unreadable.
>
> 2- the parts are so marked up with pencil marks, pen marks, erasures,
> etc., that they are unreadable.
>
> 3- the parts have to be hastily transposed for one/two/however many
> singers who cannot sing in the key a feature number is written in, hence
> the music to a particular number, along with parts of the segue music
> before and following the feature number are not available for all of the
> paid rehearsal time, and when they are finally available, the copyist's
> manuscript is so bad, the part is unreadable. (Today this is avoided by
> printing out the parts with computer software - I love technology! Long
> may it wave!)
>
> 4- There are myriad other possibilities - most of which I've forgotten.
> I usually was so happy to be getting paid to play music, and managed to
> ignore all the sniping, played whatever was there, and went home, glad I
> was out of the restaurant business for a while. So far, no one's come
> back to assassinate me yet.
>
> Patricia Smith
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>

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