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Re: Italian Clarinetists Today

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2020-02-05 00:43

The intrepid clarinet scholar Ingrid Elizabeth Pearson kindly provided me with the following link to her many published papers on the history of the instrument, including one that presents the salient information in her 2001 dissertation on the "reed up" embouchure. The relevant paper is about number 21 in the long list, and is entitled "The Reed-Above Embouchure: Fact or Fallacy?" https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ingrid_Pearson.

She demonstrates just how pervasive the reed up position is in the history of the clarinet and suggests in her concluding remarks that players on period clarinets should try the reed up position when performing such pieces as the Cavallini Caprices or the works of Busoni because that's how they played the instrument. In England, John Mahon (1815) and Thomas Lindsay Willman (1828) were still playing with the reed up, and in Italy (especially Naples) the tradition was alive and well throughout the 19th century in the playing and teaching of Ferdinando Sebastaiani and Gaetano Lebanchi, long after the Germans and French had switched.

She is presently working on another new research paper that further pursues this topic, which I await with considerable interest.

To answer Karl's original question of whether anybody plays that way now, evidently Dr. Pearson's answer would be, well, to be properly adventurous historically, somebody should!

Post Edited (2020-02-05 01:49)

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2020-01-29 12:47