 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: derf5585
Date: 2015-05-15 02:32
If a composer scores for the A clarinet is it alright to play it on a Bb clarinet?
fsbsde@yahoo.com
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Author: kdk
Date: 2015-05-15 02:46
Alright with whom? If the composer is still living, he might care.
There are clarinetists who are insistent that some composers chose the instrument (A, Bb, C) deliberately for some characteristic - mostly either sound quality or the way solo passages lie within register boundaries. Since we can't reliably tell why a composer made a particular choice, we should assume they are all informed, deliberate decisions. For those players, using a different clarinet from the one the composer asked for is heretical and to be condemned.
Orchestral players frequently use the "wrong" clarinet for a lot of different reasons. You don't ever hear of their being fired because of it. They don't tell, conductors don't generally ask and audience members (possibly excepting other clarinetists) in most cases don't know the difference. Of course, this isn't an issue in band or jazz playing, where only Bb soprano clarinets are ever used.
In the end, unless a rare conductor is waiting to make a point of it, the only real issue is whether or not it's "alright" with the player him- or herself.
Karl
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Author: Wisco99
Date: 2015-05-15 09:18
"For those players, using a different clarinet from the one the composer asked for is heretical and to be condemned."
Geez, what do you want to do next, burn the musical heretics at the stake? The composer is not paying you to play the part, so support the 1st Amendment and feel free to play the part on the instrument you choose. Composers are not gods, they are mere mortals who write notes on paper, and hope somebody pays them money and plays their music. I don't think using a different clarinet than the one the composer requested rises to the level of a high crime or heresy. It is just music. The important part is to play it well. LET FREEDOM RING!
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-05-16 15:28
And .......... good luck finding a "D" clarinet to play Strauss. Or an "A" bass clarinet for Wagner.
............Paul Aviles
Post Edited (2015-05-16 15:30)
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2015-05-16 16:10
The Bayreuth Festspielhaus owns a bass in A that's used for their Wagner performances.
I asked Ronnie Reuben (Philadelphia Orch.) whether he had ever played a bass in A, and he said no. He knew the parts so well on Bb bass that it would confuse him *not* to transpose.
There was a long discussion on the Klarinet board maybe 20 years ago about the bass in A. Even the proponents admitted that it was almost impossible to get one and that transposition on the Bb was the way to go.
We're so used to hearing Till Eulenspiegel on the Eb that it would probably sound insufficiently rude on the D.
It would be nice to have a D, if only to play the Molter Concertos, but finding a good one with an appropriate mouthpiece is problematic. And anyway, if you're going to play Molter, you really need a 5-key clarinet and put the reed on top.
Ken Shaw
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Author: kdk
Date: 2015-05-16 16:59
The Philadelphia Orchestra owns a D clarinet, which AFAIK Sam Caviezel has used in performance, although I don't know what he's played on it. The two most likely candidates would be Till and Sacre du printemps. I only know they have it because our orchestra borrowed it once to read Five Pieces for Orchestra by Schoenberg in its original version, which had a D clarinet part that no one wanted to tackle transposing for a reading session.
Karl
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2015-05-16 17:34
Ken wrote: "if you're going to play Molter, you really need a 5-key clarinet and put the reed on top."
Actually you'd need a 3-key clarinet :-)
There is marvellous recording of these Concertos by Jean-Claude Veillhan. Have you heard it? I believe it's now out of print. The playing is fantastic and the sound of this instrument is so far removed from that of a modern D clarinet that I would consider a performance of this piece on modern instruments nothing more than an "arrangement".
wisco99: don't you think "playing well" involves taking the composer's intentions seriously?
Post Edited (2015-05-16 17:55)
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Author: derf5585
Date: 2015-05-16 19:11
What if I composed a piece in a concert key of E major and scored for a Bb clarinet
fsbsde@yahoo.com
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Author: davyd
Date: 2015-05-16 21:31
As I write this, I'm dealing with a work in which the arranger wrote for clarinets in Bb not knowing that we had clarinets in A. On finding out such, he was happy to rewrite selected passages for the A instruments.
Some months ago, we had an arrangement which called for the 1st player to double on Eb clarinet. He has one. But he couldn't do the performance, and his substitute didn't have, nor did she want to borrow, an Eb, so had to play the passage on Bb. It didn't sound the same. But what can you do?
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Author: Wisco99
Date: 2015-05-16 22:37
My part calls for a B Sharp clarinet. Does this mean I can just dress in the latest fashion and use a shorter barrel?
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Author: Caroline Smale
Date: 2015-05-16 23:35
A rare selmer bass clarinet in A has in the past week or so been sold in the UK (via Clarinet Direct). It was owned by Mike Huntriss who has I understand just retired from the Bournmouth Symphony Orchestra.
I recall Mike telling me a few years back that he only used it if required to sight read some particularly difficult part as the tuning was not all it could be.
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Author: donald
Date: 2015-05-17 15:06
I'm fairly sure that in reccent years there has been an article in The Clarinet about the history of the bass clarinet (and containing very interesting information about historical bass clarinets) and I recall it dealing with the Bass Clarineti in A. If I'm not mistaken the author tried to collect an inventory of all the current known examples of a Bass clarinet in A and managed to only find about 20 (I may have got this wrong- fairly sure it was an article in the last 5 years)
dn
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Author: Chris P
Date: 2015-05-17 16:08
I had a D series Selmer bass clarinet in A back in the '80s - I wish I hung onto it but I regrettably sold it with my other harmony clarinets in the early '90s at a time when I wasn't doing any playing and needed the money. The tuning had a lot to be desired on it as did the lower joint keywork on the Bb bass of the same era.
Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.
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Author: Tony F
Date: 2015-05-17 18:12
" The composer is not paying you to play the part, so support the 1st Amendment and feel free to play the part on the instrument you choose. Composers are not gods, they are mere mortals who write notes on paper, and hope somebody pays them money and plays their music. I don't think using a different clarinet than the one the composer requested rises to the level of a high crime or heresy. It is just music. The important part is to play it well. LET FREEDOM RING!"
Well, Wisco99, I'd like to be a fly on the wall when you present this argument to a maestro cast in the purist mold. It would be better than daytime TV!
Tony F.
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Author: Caroline Smale
Date: 2015-05-17 22:55
Tony, nice to know you have the spare time, let alone the inclination, to watch daytime TV.
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Author: fskelley
Date: 2015-05-18 01:18
Wisco99, be sure you use a B# clarinet, not a C. Somewhere in the bowels of music history and scale theory there is an important distinction between the 2. And any conductor worth his salt will hear it a mile away, and demand it be done correctly.
Stan in Orlando
EWI 4000S with modifications
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Author: brycon
Date: 2015-05-19 01:19
Quote:
wisco99: don't you think "playing well" involves taking the composer's intentions seriously?
Liquorice, that's an interesting thought;it also came up several months ago, when Ricardo Morales peformed an earlier draft of Debussy's Rhapsody.
With regard to your question, Wisco99 makes an interesting point (albeit one that has been more elegantly stated by numerous mid-20th century philsophers and literary theorists). Once a composer writes a piece, he/she submits it to the public, to make of it what they will. Our interpretation of a piece of art, therefore, isn't bound by what the composer (or writer, painter, choreographer, etc.) intended.
Nevertheless, many people still seek the "correct" interpretation of a piece of art in the intentions of its creator, or as Roland Barthes wrote: "To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing." This isn't to say, however, that some interpretations aren't better than others. I could say that Beethoven's 9th Symphony is about milk and cookies. Of course, it probably isn't about milk and cookies--not for the reason that Beethoven intended it to be otherwise, but because the music itself doesn't support such an interpretation.
Some of my favorite interpretations go against the composer's intentions--for example, Furtwangler's Beethoven symphonies. But I think that great artists, like Furtwangler, seriously consider what's in the text (in this case, Beethoven's metronome markings) and make an informed decision.
So while you're absolutely correct (we should seriously consider what clarinet we use), I think the matter is one of "what does the music require?" rather than "what would the composer want?"
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Author: azuka
Date: 2015-05-19 19:18
I have a friend who has dedicated the last 40 years of his life to transcribing arranging, and transposing obscure music for his community band in Ypsilanti Michigan.
He has often told me of the difficulties of finding the original score to a vintage march or something, only to find that the instrumentation is obsolete.
So, it IS ok to use instrumentation other than what the composer had in mind. They were working with what was easily available at the time.
Having played in a community orchestra, I found that it is VERY common to have music written with the A clarinet in mind. It's easy enough to use a Bb to play because transposing on the fly between these two horns is so easy. You DO run into a trouble with pieces that utilize low E since you need the low Eb key on a Bb clarinet to hit that note. So Peter and the Wolf is out unless you either have an A clarinet, or an extended range Bb clarinet.
Go to Ebay, and look around, A clarinets can be found at decent prices if you take your time and do not insist on only playing a Buffet R13.
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2015-05-20 01:41
brycon- basically I agree with you, although I'm not sure I'd agree with the overriding conclusion "what does the music require?".
Anybody can take notes which are written on a page and interpret them in any way that they like. A good musician, like Furtwängler, could totally RE-interpret what Beethoven wrote, making enough necessary adjustments and balancing various elements, to end up producing a thoroughly convincing performance, even if it sounds completely different from what Beethoven originally intended. A Bach fugue can sound fantastic played on 4 harmonicas. A heavy metal band could play their version of a Beethoven symphony. Everyone has the right to do this, and the final result is a combination of the quality of the original piece, plus the interpreter's (or re-arranger's) talent and skill.
Sometimes, it is not the music, but the musicians or other external factors, which must influence the interpretation. A community band may not own basset horns, the players may not have the skill to play at Beethoven's metronome marks, or the church hall might just be too reverberant to play at the original crisp tempo.
However, I do believe that most of the time, performers can benefit from making the effort to find out what the composer had in mind and at least giving it a go. Surprisingly (or not?!) the results can be fantastic. Far too often, I see players being sadly ignorant, or rejecting composers' instructions out of hand because "Beethoven's metronome didn't work properly", "C clarinets are out of tune", "those instruments sound horrible", or a bunch of other excuses.
Of course, a composer's original intention is not the only way. You may be able to give a totally riveting performance of "Take the A Train" playing straight 8ths with uniform articulation and regular accents on beats 1 and 3, but you'd be well advised to at least find out what Mr Strayhorn originally expected his players to do with the notes. No?
Post Edited (2015-05-20 01:46)
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Author: brycon
Date: 2015-05-20 02:56
Liquorice,
Interesting points! (And thanks for breaking up the monotony of ligature threads.)
With regard to "Take the A Train", when I play this tune, I'm not at all concerned with what Billy Strayhorn intended: I feel free to reharmonize some chords, play in a different rhythmic feel (nobody swings in the dotted eighth/sixteenth style that Duke did), use a bebop/post-bop vocabulary when I solo, etc.
This attitude is because, as I've written before, jazz is more of an oral tradition rather than a notated one; the divergence from the text is one of its most important facets. (It's also why no one really cares who composed the standards: you wouldn't say, for example, "Check out this tune by Billy Strayhorn!" But you would say, "Check out Joe Henderson playing 'Take the A Train'!")
Going back to reinterpreting what Beethoven wrote, what I meant by "what the music requires" isn't just the notes, articulations, and expression markings on the page but also the essence of the piece, what's required to make a performance of Beethoven 9 truly Beethoven 9.
For me, part of what makes Beethoven 9 what it is is the sense of struggle, which manifests itself in the dramatic opposition of loud/soft, dense/light, stable/unstable as well as in various instrumental combinations, key centers, and development of motif (I realize that description is vague, but you get the idea). Furtwangler brings attention to these things with his interpretation, whereas a heavy metal band, with amplified instruments that lack the nuances of an orchestra, would be much less successful. So for me, the heavy metal performance might be interesting, but it would be a new piece of music. (This argument is almost a musical version of Theseus' ship.)
I completely agree with you about players being ignorant, and I like that you pointed out the "broken metronome" myth, which is often used here in the States to justify ignoring the tempo markings in the score. At the same time, I think that limiting interpretation based on the intentions of the composer is equally problematic, as Barthes, Foucault, and other philosophers have pointed out. I believe the solution is along the lines of what Richard Taruskin writes in his book of essays, Text and Act: musicians need to understand music theory and history (really, just music in general), and take ownership of their interpretative decisions rather than relying on scholarly editions and performance practice gurus to do the work for them.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2015-05-20 04:22
Liquorice wrote:
> However, I do believe that most of the time, performers can
> benefit from making the effort to find out what the composer
> had in mind and at least giving it a go. Surprisingly (or
> not?!) the results can be fantastic. Far too often, I see
> players being sadly ignorant, or rejecting composers'
> instructions out of hand because "Beethoven's metronome didn't
> work properly", "C clarinets are out of tune", "those
> instruments sound horrible", or a bunch of other excuses.
>
Depends to some extent, perhaps, on the specific composer. Of course, we have no idea what tempos Beethoven actually took in performances of his own music. We have only the markings on early printed editions or the manuscripts. But we have recordings of Stravinsky and Copland, two well-known composers who were more or less notorious for not observing their own metronome markings when they conducted their own music. My impression is that, at least among living or recently living composers, well-known or not, many score markings are negotiable depending on performance conditions.
So if a composer can at least partially ignore his own markings, it's hard to make the case that other performers can't assume the same latitude with reason. Did Sousa begin the repeat of the last strain of his marches slower that the rest of the march? It's done often, especially if the march is the program finale. It isn't marked in the editions I've seen.
To back up a little, though, the original question had to do with substituting one clarinet for another in classical contexts where there are reasons, usually technical rather than musical, and traditions supporting the change. It doesn't seem, at least to me, to be the same issue as choosing tempos or changing rhythmic or harmonic vocabulary for the sake of producing an individualized, idiosyncratic "interpretation." Playing "A Train" with straight eighth-notes and accents on 1 and 3 doesn't seem comparable to playing the beginning of the Brahms 3rd on an A clarinet to avoid the impossibly quick switch for the solo or playing Till Eulenspiegel (or Le Sacre) on an Eb clarinet because you have no access to a D.
Karl
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2015-05-20 11:08
Karl- I think the issue of clarinet choice falls into the broader issue of which attitude one has when approching a piece of music. Examining the intention of the composer surely has to be an very important STARTING POINT in this process.
This doesn't mean that we always have to only play exactly the metronome markings given by a composer. Shostakovich (who also meticulously gave metronome markings for his works and then didn't stick to them in his own performances) gives a metronome marking of Quarter=208 for the moderato movement in the 9th symphony. This is very fast- faster than most recorded performances of this movement. But it certainly gives an indication of the kind of approach Shostakovich wanted i.e. a moderate pulse per bar rather than per beat. If a student comes and plays the opening of this movement at Quarter=120 then I can only assume that they haven't done their homework.
There are many times when composers ask for the use of specific clarinets. If we're talking about great composers, we can usually assume that they knew what they wanted. Richard Strauss in the introduction to Der Rosenkavalier states that, under no cicumstances should the C clarinet parts be transposed onto B-flat clarinet. I've played this opera using C clarinet and it quickly became clear that the lighter, clearer sound of the C clarinet fits better in exactly those places where Strauss uses it. I've had this experience of using the correct instrument and the glove just "fitting" in many, many other pieces of music. Having "no access to a D" seems to me to be a rather sorry excuse, at least at professional level.
Of course there are times when it's impossible to change, or other cicumstances which prevent the use of the notated instrument. In a cold and draughty church I would also rather transpose than play too low on a cold A clarinet that I haven't used for 30 minutes and can't bring up to pitch in time.
We players have to make the final decisions about performance. But my point is that we should use the composer's intentions (which involve far more than just a study of the written score) as our starting point.
brycon- I'm sorry if my Strayhorn example was a bad one. An interesting question would be: at what point does changing the original composition turn it into a different piece? For instance, playing Molter on modern instruments sounds so different from the original that I would consider a performance on modern instruments an "arrangement"of the piece. If you slow down Beethoven's matronome markings to the extreme you'll eventually be playing a different piece too.
In the meantime I'm going to check out Henderson's A Train.
Post Edited (2015-05-20 11:11)
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