Klarinet Archive - Posting 000123.txt from 2010/10

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Clarinet and organ (was: Weber concerto No. 1)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:19:57 -0400


Tom Bassett wrote,
>>I've wondered though.. if organ is the better way to go for orchestral
>>reductions. They have the pedals so there can be 3 staves of music, they
>>can sustain pitches, and they have stops for different timbres. If you
>>have a big enough organ, it can probably crank up to the volume of an
>>orchestra too. >>

Yup. And an over-enthusiastic organist playing a pipe organ that's bigger
than big enough can drown out an entire orchestra with the greatest of ease.
Make that two orchestras. And the Navy band.

If you plan to play solo clarinet or chamber music with this organ, I
suggest you arrive at rehearsal early, before the organist gets there.
Bring sticky notes. Go look at the organ, and I don't mean just the console
and the pretty facade pipes - although you do want to take note of the
number of keyboards (More than two? Be afraid, be very afraid....) and
stop knobs (Lots and lots? Uh-oh.) and look up atop the facade to see
whether metal pipes that look like long, Renaissance trumpets stick out up
there. Those are horizontal trumpets and they're not just decorative.

Then find the little door that leads to Wonderland, the back room the
audience doesn't see, where most of the organ really lives. If it looks
like the Redwood Forest back there, with crawl walks and overhead catwalks,
then go back out front and peruse the console again. Look for stop knobs
labelled Trompette en Chamade or Tromba Horizontale (or anything else with
"Horizontal" or "en Chamade" in the name - these are various labels for
those horizontal trumpets up top), Harmonic Trumpet, Harmonic Tuba, Fan
Trumpet, Field Trumpet (or similar names such as State Trumpet or Military
Trumpet), Post-Horn (of any nationality...), Diaphone (or any permutation
thereof, especially Contra-Diaphone and Diaphonic Diapason), Cornet des
Bombardes, Flauto Mirabilis, Grand Mixture, Harmonic Clarion,Tuba Magna,
Contra Tuba, Solo Tuba, Contra-Bombarde, Contra-Trombone, Scharf Mixture,
Jubalflote, Ophicleide and, above all, anything whose name includes the
word Thunder or Stentor, especially the Stentor Bombarde. Beware of any of
these names translated into other languages, too. Organ-builders are very
tricky, oops, I mean *creative*, when it comes to labelling their stops.

All of these can be superb pipes, in the right kind of solo organ music --
say, Franck's "Final," where the general idea is to blow the audience over
backwards. As you identify these bellowing, roaring, screaming monsters,
write "Out of Order" on the little sticky notes and stick them on those stop
knobs. Don't worry, the organist won't suspect a thing. Organists are used
to half the instrument being out of order.
;-)

Lelia Loban
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/Lelia_Loban

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