Author: seabreeze
Date: 2014-11-24 20:58
A statistician taking a large sample of clarinetists would probably find that players generally do use heavier reeds as the tip opens and softer reeds as the tip closes. But if a sample were taken of the players who are most delightful, creatively musical, and satisfying (all very subjective criteria) that generalization might not hold at all, and in fact, a solid pattern (other than randomness or unpredictability) might not even emerge. The bottom line is that if you are a musician first and a clarinetist second, the generalities presented in much common knowledge may be of little or no help to you. You try the advice, and it either works for you or does not. If it doesn't work, you try something else to reach your artistic goal.
Behn, Omar Henderson, and Chris Hill all evidently believe that to achieve a 1920s to 30s clarinet sound as exemplified in such vintage mouthpieces as the Chedevilles and the Roberts, a special kind of rubber is required. But note--this is not exactly conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom rather lazily and stagnantly says rubber is better than plastic, ivory, or stainless steel. This is more of a probing, developing kind of hypothesis tested by cutting up old mouthpieces and chemically analyzing their material properties and then trying to produce new blanks that have some of the same characteristics. Another mouthpiece expert, such as Ramon Wodkowski, chooses to pursue a different hypothesis--that the dimensions of a mouthpiece are of much greater importance to its sound and overall performance than the chemical makeup of the material. When his "Napoleon" interpretation of a Chedeville comes out soon, it will be possible for players to compare the outcome of his approach to that of Behn, Hill, and Henderson in making a Ched-like mouthpiece. This is not common knowledge; this is empirical testing. We cannot know the outcome until we have tried the mouthpieces, and even then we may all choose to disagree and not develop any fixed and settled common knowledge on this point.
Behn also seems to be implying that copying old Cheds and Roberts--whatever their merits-- may not be the best goal to follow for the future development of mouthpieces. Common knowledge tends to sneer at plastic mouthpieces but, as he says, if the right design changes are made, some plastics (I would suggest acrylics among them) might be made to play very well indeed (that is, even better than most rubber ones???). When I recently tried the new MS MCK1 (which comes in a variety of acrylics) the first thought that came to my mid was "this plays right out the box better than any rubber mouthpiece I have tried." Based on my little epiphany, I am prepared to scrap the common knowledge that rubber--even vintage Chedeville rubber--is necessarily better.
By the way, the same kind of skeptical approach to common knowledge in mouthpieces can be applied to every point that you raised in your list. To take just two more, for instance, if the rails are widened articulation is supposed to be slowed, and big tone chambers make darker sounds than small tone chambers. One of the easiest mouthpiece to blow and to articulate on I have ever played is a James Kanter that also happens to have the widest tip and side rails of any piece in my collection--wider than those on a Vandoren M30D, a D. Johnston, or a Nick Kuckmeier. Wide rails are supposed to add resistance, and they usually do. but we can only play one mouthpiece at a time, and THIS ONE doesn't follow that statistical generalization. For the player, the single mouthpiece trumps the 60,000 other pieces that uphold the force of common knowledge. How did Kanter build this into a mouthpiece with such wide rails? I have no idea but there must be other countervailing features that offset the wide rails. Is this a perfect mouthpiece? Not at all. It is great for recording work in an acoustically dead studio but lacks the resonance needed for large halls. But surely the common knowledge that large chambers make dark sounds and narrower ones make brighter, edgier sound must be true? Well maybe for many mouthpieces but certainly not for all. Examine the chambers in the Kuckmeier Play Easy model, the Grabner G11, and the Vandoren M30D as compared with the wider chamber in Richard Hawkins' B model. The first 3 play very dark with little or no edge yet have medium small chambers; the last--with a wider chamber-- plays brighter with more center resonance and a fair amount of edge.
The practical question of how a given mouthpiece plays can only be answered by playing it; common knowledge may apply or may not.
Post Edited (2014-11-24 21:25)
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