Author: mrn
Date: 2009-01-23 10:38
Ohhh...wait a minute! I think I know what you're talking about. For some reason it didn't quite dawn on me that we were talking about high school band. I had a similar problem when I was in high school band. My tone projects very well, which is a real plus in an orchestra, but can sometimes be a minus when you sit first chair in the high school band (especially since you have to play so much up high).
The problem with playing in a high school band is that bands use clarinets to take the place of the strings in an orchestra. Strings don't project all that well (even on really high notes)--relatively speaking--that's why you need so many of them in an orchestra. As an orchestral wind instrument, the clarinet is designed to be able to cut through all those strings--so, in a sense, a clarinet is an overkill substitute for a violin. Couple that with the fact that the strongest, most confident players in a school band usually play the highest notes (which project the best, anyway) and the weakest projecting low notes are often played by the most timid players in the section, and you have a recipe for balance problems.
In my case, it was very easy for me to overpower the section in high school, especially given that high school clarinet players are often predisposed to play somewhat timidly. And for the director, it was probably easier to try to get me to play more softly than it was to get the entire section to play out more. What I learned to do was to think of myself not so much as the main attraction of the clarinet section (which was easy to do sitting first chair), but as the icing on the cake--that extra little color on top. If I couldn't clearly hear all the other layers of the clarinet-section cake, I had to back off. Usually this meant playing everything about 1-2 notches lower on the dynamics scale from the written page (at least from my point of view). To make it easier to play at low dynamics, I used really responsive reeds (so that soft notes would speak). These days to accomplish this, I'd play on something like Grand Concert Select Evolutions, which have almost a hair-trigger response if you get a good one. If playing on a mouthpiece that projects less helps you do this, then by all means, I would use it.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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