 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2011-08-25 19:09
I live about 80 miles north of Tuesday's 5.8 Richter earthquake centered in Mineral, Virginia. As you've probably read, earthquakes on the East Coast transmit more strongly and over a much wider area than the more common West Coast earthquakes of the same magnitude, because bedrock is near the surface here and tends to be more solid and less broken up then in the West.
The only alleged musical instrument the earthquake damaged in my house is a highly decorated Peruvian ceramic flute that fell to the floor and broke cleanly in half. It's a total hunk o' junk as a flute and worth very little money (probably something the Incas mass-produced to sell to tourists at Machu Picchu in the early 20th century) and I was able to glue it with a nearly invisible repair. I don't much care about the damage.
But my husband and I would have cared a lot if our real musical instruments had been damaged. If they hadn't all been secure in their cases, damage definitely would have happened. The quake tossed stuff out of shelves and off the tops of other furniture, all over the house.
We made the habit of keeping instruments in cases to protect them from cats, not quakes. Nobody expects an earthquake around here, let alone the biggest quake since 1897. ("Nobody expects ... the Spanish Inquisition!") But better safe than sorry.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: TianL
Date: 2011-08-25 19:31
i'm about 100 miles away from that earthquake (just a bit north of you, Lelia). i was at work at the time and i remembered that i left my clarinet on the stand the previous night so i was a bit worried. but fortunately i had the nice and heavy blaymann stand so it didn't tip over.. (it probably also helped that i'm in MD instead of VA.. for some reason, though only 20 miles apart, the VA/DC areas were a lot worse than here).
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Author: TianL
Date: 2011-08-25 19:32
and now we are getting the hurricane right after the earthquake!! what's going on to the east coast these days??
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Author: Ed
Date: 2011-08-25 21:58
The good news is that I hear that the vibrations from an earthquake help relax the wood in clarinets and makes them more resonant.
;-)
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Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2011-08-25 22:32
My clarinets do indeed sound more resonant since the Big Virginia Earthquake of 2011 (I can hear the yawns and mumbled "big deal" from the Californians.....).
Welcome to the century of human-induced climate change, kiddos. It's real, unlike some claims that have been made for clarinet accessories.
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2011-08-26 00:45
In Brooklyn, the quake was was all horizontal motion, strong enough to topple a (much too high) leaning stack of CDs.
At first I thought it was a dumpster-carrier truck outside making a pickup or delivery, but when my office chair started rolling back and forth, I figured out what was going on.
Florence Foster Jenkins was almost in a wreck in a taxi, and she gave the driver a $100 tip because she had managed to screech out a higher note than ever before. Unfortunately, I wasn't playing clarinet when the quake hit ![[grin]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie5.gif) .
Ken Shaw
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2011-08-26 17:39
David Spiegelthal wrote,
>>(I can hear the yawns and mumbled "big deal" from the Californians.....)>>
I *am* a Californian from birth through age 26, with a few brief interludes elsewhere along the way. I lived near the San Andreas fault, famous from the 1906 San Francisco quake. Not mumbling "big deal," though, because I rarely experienced quakes that *felt* as strong as this Virginia quake did.
Even though I know all too well what an earthquake feels like, and even though Jane Feline told me this earthquake was coming a few minutes before it hit, my first thought when the loud rumbling and shaking started was, "Oh, [bleep], we've been bombed." Living just outside Washington, D.C., within earshot of the Pentagon on 9/11, will do that to you. Maybe I'm closer related to those apes in the National Zoo than I realized, though, because without any help from Jane, I awakened at 1 a.m. the other night, a few minutes before the 4.5 R aftershock.
My husband and I plan to take our best instruments down to the basement ahead of Hurricane Irene, just in case the black walnut crashes on the house. The nuts are gigantic this year, the size of softballs, twice as big as normal. They're dropping like bombs on the roof with the slightest breeze. Two big limbs fell in the last week even though the tree seems healthy. I just hope plenty more walnuts fall and relieve the weight on those branches before the tropical winds arrive.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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