 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: laughing.len
Date: 2017-01-04 20:15
Hello,
I have recently bought a couple of old clarinets to tinker with, and was hoping someone might be able to fill in a few blanks I am left with after my initial research.
One of the clarinets (a variation on a standard Boehm in a warm brown/reddish wood, which I believe to be a 'C') carries the impressed Buffet Crampon & Cie oval on the bell, lower and upper joint (which is also marked Brevetes S.G.D.C.) but there is no Buffet-marked barrel. Instead, the clarinet has a WD Cubitt Son & Co barrel that fits the clarinet well, with its bottom-aperture diameter of aproximately 22.75mm.
The clarinet has no serial numbers but I was hoping the presence of a wrap-around register key, 2 No. flat-springs screwed to the underside of different salt-spoon keys (resulting in steel 'dots' in the finished surface), a 'donut' ring key over the L2 tone hole, and a simple ring key over the L3 tone hole might offer enough clues for me to identify its age to within a few years.
While the above features each seem fairly distinctive, I am struggling to find them all in a single instrument from which to infer an age - they seem to be distributed amongst instruments from a number of different decades. Is anyone able to offer any advice / pointers, in particular:
- Is there a good pictographic reference of Buffet clarinets through the ages (books, brochures, websites), that anyone would like to recommend? To date, a google image search has been my best bet but I've struggled to articulate the search terms well enough to get reliably good results.
- The WD Cubitt barrel can be dated to between 1882-1886; is this simply too early for an instrument with the above features? It would seemingly give a 2-3 year window before the Buffet serial numbers begin, but is the hardware / keywork pointing to a later date (or even a marriage)?
- Is it conceivable that a Buffet clarinet would ever have been supplied to a retailer without a Buffet-branded barrel, or with a blank barrel for a retailer to finish? Is it more likely that the retailer manufactured a replacement barrel, or the original barrel has simply become lost by a previous keeper?
Thanks in advance,
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Author: Jeroen
Date: 2017-01-04 20:34
laughing.len wrote:
>> - Is it conceivable that a Buffet clarinet would ever have been
> supplied to a retailer without a Buffet-branded barrel, or with
> a blank barrel for a retailer to finish? Is it more likely that
> the retailer manufactured a replacement barrel, or the original
> barrel has simply become lost by a previous keeper?
I would not bother about the barrel too much. It is indeed very likely that it has been replaced because the original barrel has cracked, lost or played out of tune.
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