Klarinet Archive - Posting 000081.txt from 2008/03

From: "Daniel Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Key signatures for clarinets
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:23:26 -0400

The discussion about the choice of clarinet pitch for works written before
approximately 1850 presumes that what the printed part says is derived from
the composer's directions.

Not so. The printed parts often contradicted the composer's specific
direction.

Part of the training of a composer for works from the classic and even up to
the early romantic period (which certainly includes Mendelssohn) involved
the question of what clarinet pitch should be requested by the composer.
And that decision was exclusively related to the concert key of the
composition.

Consequently, when Bill Foss documented the clarinet pitches for the
Mendelssohn Italian symphony as, "I have played this in several professional
orchestras. Sometimes the clarinet parts were in
A and sometimes in B-flat," serves only to show what the particular edition
called for, not necessarily what the composer called for.

Publishing houses, like Breitkopf, for example, issued orchestral parts that
reflected editorial decisions that often contradicted the composer's
explicit instructions. If their editions were to be used by amateur or even
semi-professional orchestral players, they almost always provided a
transposed clarinet part under the assumption that less skilled players did
not necessarily own such an instrument and were not really fully competent
in transposition at sight.

The rule was this: clarinets should not be written in sharp keys. Mozart, in
a lesson book used by one of this theory and composition students wrote (in
English, too) that "the clarinet should only be written in the keys of C and
F. What that meant was that the clarinet pitch selected by the composer was
for the sole purpose of restricting the clarinet part to those keys. And
that rule was in effect when Mendelssohn wrote his Italian symphony.

Since the concert key of the Italian symphony is A major, clarinets in both
C and B-flat were not to be used; i.e., the C would have to play in 3
sharps, and the B-flat would have to play in 5 sharps. Instead clarinets in
A were appropriate because in the concert pitch of A major, the A clarinet
plays in written C major; i.e., NO SHARPS IN THE KEY SIGNATURE FOR CLARINET
PLAYERS.

Mozart himself chose to get around this constraint by writing clarinet parts
in the WRONG KEY so that the instrument would not, in theory at least, be
playing in a written key with sharps. Most of the overture to Don Giovanni
has the clarinet deliberately written in the wrong key particularly at the
point where the key of the overture goes from d minor to d major.

Bottom line: one cannot use published orchestral parts in support of what
the composer requested in his manuscript score.

There were a few exceptions to this rule, to be sure, but that it existed as
I have described is certain. About 6 months ago, someone on this list asked
me for a copy of the technical paper that Bob Levin and I did for the Mozart
Jahrbuch on this subject. I sent it but he never responded.

Dan Leeson
dnleeson@-----.net
SKYPE: dnleeson

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