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RE: Left-Handed Clarinet?

Author: Ken Shaw
Date: 2001-05-11 18:25

Av Galper's picture is the only left-handed clarinet I've seen, but I think the original Denner clarinet had litle finger holes on both sides for F/C and a right thumb key for E/B. It had no throat Ab key. You made the Ab using just the register key.

Baroque flutes had only one key, and the foot joint could be rotated to play the instrument left-handed. A famous virtuoso named Buffardin played that way.

Irish flutes can be played left-handed. The flutist in the Chieftains plays that way.

Charlie Ponte had a left-handed Boehm flute hanging on the wall in his music store for years. It wasn't in playable condition, though.

For about a year, Yamaha ran a "flopped" 2-page color ad in lots of music magazines, including the middle of The Clarinet magazine, showing a technician working on a new clarinet, with dozens of instruments around him, all looking left-handed. They finally wized up, but caught a lot of nasty comments.

I know a cellist who had a mirror image instrument made, which she played left-handed. She was in one of the top regional orchestras for many years. Gunther Goebel, a prominent baroque violin virtuoso and leader of Musiqua Antiqua Cologne, had severe repetitive stress injuries and had to teach himself to play left-handed, with a mirror-image violin. You can't play a string instrument left-handed simply by reversing the order of the strings. The bass bar (a ridge on the underside of the top) and the sound post have to be moved to the opposite sides of the interior.

I suppose everyone has tried playing clarinet left-handed. It's possible to play a scale and find ways to press some (but not all) of the keys with the palms of your hands. *Very* confusing.

Ken Shaw

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