Klarinet Archive - Posting 000566.txt from 2005/06

From: Bill Hausmann <bhausmann1@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] metal clarinets
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 01:11:31 -0400

At 10:06 AM 6/27/2005 -0400, Adam Michlin wrote:
>You might be surprised. More and more big band and wind ensemble music is
>requiring the soprano saxophone and the schools are playing this
>literature (whether or not they are playing it well is an entirely
>different matter). Not just the biggest and best, but it certainly does
>depend on affluence, geography, and regional support for the arts. I'm
>told such programs are common in New York state and Texas, for example. I
>see them often enough in Northern New Jersey and Northern California such
>that I would not call them rare. I am now quite close to nit picking on
>semantics, however, sorry. It is also interesting to note that there
>clearly is a burgeoning market in quality intermediate soprano saxophones
>(the YSS-475 being, by far, the best deal going, in my experience).

In my work I travel to schools every day to provide service to band
directors. Granted, my route does not take me to the BEST bands in the St.
Louis area, who probably DO play that literature, but overall the numbers
are still small. Only once in my own saxophone/clarinet career have I ever
played soprano in a concert band, or I believe even been IN a band in which
soprano was played, and that was for the Grainger "Shepherd's Hey" -- and
then only because I volunteered.

>To get back on-topic, my experience has been that it as almost equally as
>likely that a high school jazz band saxophone student will play clarinet
>parts on soprano saxophone as they will on clarinet. I even see this in
>collegiate ensembles. A "metal" clarinet, indeed. <sigh>

Clarinet parts in CURRENT school jazz band arrangements are possibly rarer
than soprano sax parts in concert band arrangements! Doubling is a lost
art at that level, and few arrangers dare to limit their potential
clientele that way. Soprano sax is an easy, if extremely un-Leeson, way to
fudge it. That or you borrow legitimate clarinet players from the concert
band, who play only for that number. I've seen that done, too (for
Ellington's "The Mooche, I believe).

Bill Hausmann

If you have to mic a saxophone, the rest of the band is TOO LOUD!

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