Author: Clarimellonet
Date: 2021-04-30 04:24
Thanks for the mention, BarryTones!
I'm on here, occasionally, though not a frequent poster.
I've met Bill a few times and we've talked quite a bit about our respective paths through the period instrument world, building our own instruments, etc. The period clarinet replicas he built back in the 80s and 90s are all gorgeous; I've play tested couple of them over the years (his Lotz/Griesbacher Basset horn with the extra chromatic keys for Eb and C#, and his adapted Lotz Bb and extrapolated C clarinet) and they all feel and sound great.
The video recordings with his boxwood Buffet are great. I think there's a certain amount of fluidity and delicate attack that comes with using boxwood (there are quite a few surviving boxwood Buffets from the very first production runs in the 1840s) though of course the internal bore design, mouthpiece, and reed interact to produce an overall playing experience. I certainly understand the desire to move away from boxwood as more keys were added, since the wood isn't quite as stable as grenadilla or ebony, but I do think there is such a thing as sacrificing quality of sound and ease of playability for projection and material stability. Of course in the 21st century almost 200 years removed from the invention of the Boehm-System, our own preconceptions of what sounds "good" have no doubt changed, so it's all subjective anyways.
I've actually been talking on and off with a couple people at various modern firms about the possibility of adapting a set of modern instruments to boxwood with appropriate modifications to ensure as much stability as possible. After years of playing primarily on historical clarinets, I definitely feel less "at home" on my modern instruments (either Boehm or Oehler) when I have to play on them simply because the material doesn't respond in the same manner. I wish I were set up in my workshop to just build myself a set of modern instruments to my own specifications, but my tooling and skill with key making stops around 1840 or so, and I don't have quite enough space to set aside an area for casting.
If you click through the links on my media page to my actual YouTube page, there are quite a few more performance videos, the ones on my website are all from a couple years ago.
~Thomas
Thomas Carroll
Historical Clarinets and Chalumeaux
http://carrollclarinet.com
lotzofgrenser@gmail.com
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The Clarinet BBoard
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