Klarinet Archive - Posting 000422.txt from 2004/08

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Bass Clarinet in A - historical evidence?
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 15:51:11 -0400

There are several b.c.'s in A in various instrumental museums.
And I'm certainly not the only person who owned one. But I
suppose that statement presumes a particular moment in history.
It is absolutely a true statement if it was voiced in the early
part of the 19th century. So the key question is what timeframe
was Blatter speaking about?

It is not unreasonable to conclude that the A bass clarinet did
NOT exist and composers wrote for it under the mistaken
impression that since there were A clarinets, there must have
been A bass clarinets. And then, in reaction to the existence of
music for the instrument, someone actually built one, a kind of
backward view of world history. But I cannot defend that quickly
invented piece of history. It is possible, but I don't think it
to be probable.

Groves dictionary of Music and Musicians (whose editor wrote a
smashingly good review of my book and if you don't buy and read
it, you will get a foot fungus like you would not believe) has a
lengthy article about the clarinet, which explicitly speaks of
the instrument in the mid 1800s.

But personally, I think that Blatter is full of doo doo and he
should get a foot fungus. Composers were taught to write for
clarinets in simple keys. Maybe they were told that clarinetists
were simple minded so they needed simple keys. Thus, you don't
find much for clarinet in complicated keys until the last half of
the 19th century. To keep clarinets out of complicated keys, the
practice was to change clarinets so as to forced them into easy
keys (like C, F, and G). Now which came first, the instrument or
the writing for it, I don't know. But it certainly is false to
say that "There never was such an instrument." That means that I
bought into a dream world where I was transposing and didn't even
know it.

Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net

-----Original Message-----
From: joseph.wakeling@-----.net
[mailto:joseph.wakeling@-----.net]
Sent: Saturday, August 14, 2004 12:23 PM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: [kl] Bass Clarinet in A - historical evidence?

In one of the books on orchestration that I own, Alfred Blatter's
"Instrumentation/Orchestration", there is a mention of the
occurrence of the A
Bass in scores accompanied by a comment along the lines that
"there is a
plausible rumour that no bass clarinet in A has ever existed".

My first thought on reading this was to hand Dan the ammunition,
since I know
he has owned one, but I am curious about this: what evidence is
there for the
existence of the A bass, historically, other than its presence in
the scores
of a number of famous composers? Are there examples of this
instrument to be
found other than in recent times?

Cheers,

-- Joe

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