Author: nellsonic
Date: 2020-09-07 09:23
Kurt Vonnegut played the clarinet in school. The instrument comes up several times in his work. Here is a quote from his novel, "Jailbird":
"Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Then I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets - without cases, mouthpieces, or bells. Life is like that sometimes.”
In "Cat's Cradle" he actually uses the clarinet as a significant plot point at the end of the novel. It would be a spoiler to reveal it. However here is what I believe is his longest passage about our instrument from that same work:
"I did not know what was going to come from Angela’s clarinet. No one
could have imagined what was going to come from there.
I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the
violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.
Angela moistened and warmed the mouthpiece, but did not blow a single
preliminary note. Her eyes glazed over, and her long, bony fingers twittered
idly over the noiseless keys.
I waited anxiously, and I remembered what Marvin Breed had told me —
that Angela’s one escape from her bleak life with her father was to her room,
where she would lock the door and play along with phonograph records.
Newt now put a long-playing record on the large phonograph in the room
off the terrace. He came back with the record’s slipcase, which he handed to
me.
The record was called Cat House Piano. It was of unaccompanied piano
by Meade Lux Lewis.
Since Angela, in order to deepen her trance, let Lewis play his first
number without joining him, I read some of what the jacket said about Lewis.
...
I looked up from my reading. The first number on the record was done.
The phonograph needle was now scratching its slow way across the void to
the second. The second number, I learned from the jacket, was “Dragon
Blues.”
Meade Lux Lewis played four bars alone–and then Angela Hoenikker
joined in.
Her eyes were closed.
I was flabbergasted.
She was great.
She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from
liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened
child, to a heroin nightmare.
Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.
Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or
demonic possession.
My hair stood on end, as though Angela were rolling on the floor,
foaming at the mouth, and babbling fluent Babylonian.
When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed,
too, “My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”
“Don’t try,” he said. “Just pretend you understand.”
“That’s — that’s very good advice.” I went limp."
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The Clarinet BBoard
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