Author: brycon
Date: 2021-08-20 21:05
Quote:
Or a decent clarinet (that can tune properly) or pads that seal properly, or regular mechanical maintenance of any kind????
Where do you wonderful musicians draw the line on gear I might ask?
Figured I'd respond because I have a bit of free time and because the board, perhaps in some form of karmic retribution for me poking fun at silly ligature threads, is currently getting spammed with silly ligature threads.
Paul, you're giving us a slippery slope.
The thing with these arguments, though, is that they can slope both directions. Where, for instance, do you draw the line? If ligature screws make an appreciable difference, what about thumb-rest screws? Post screws? What is more, if a particular choice of footwear keeps my body grounded in a particular way, what's better for clarinet playing: loafers or sneakers?
In the end, there isn't a hard "line on gear" to draw but rather vague categories in which to place things: clarinet quality, sealing pads, regular maintenance, and other clearly important things on the one hand and post screws, thumb-rest screws, and other silly things on the other. Theorists of vagueness use the term "truth-value gap" to acknowledge the lack of a sharp cut-off point between the two categories.
Going back to that "forest for the trees thread" (and ligature screws, to me, are missing both the forest and the trees because you're instead smashing yourself over the head with a fallen branch), you have to keep in mind the "purpose" of clarinet playing, which lies in interpretation and its realization. What matters with equipment, then, is what helps you realize your interpretive decisions in a performance.
This idea that a player's "sound" is the aggregate of all his or her equipment choices ("I'm going to sound great in an orchestra: I'm playing a Kaspar mouthpiece, Golden-era R13, and a Bonade ligature!") is as nonsensical as saying someone's personality is the aggregate of all his or her clothing and movie preferences. No, our personalities don't exist abstractly but through our behaviors and interactions with other people: "We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves." Similarly, our sounds don't exist abstractly, holding out a throat-tone G and analyzing overtones through a spectrogram, but rather they exists though music: the way we shape a phrase, blow our air through a note connection, and so on.
So while someone could make the somewhat credible (or, at least, not entirely silly) argument: "You know, ligature screws don't really affect my sound, but they change the way I interact with my instrument, which in turn affects my sound and therefore makes them a variable worth experimenting with." I would simply point out that a much more important variable, because, unlike the ligature screws, it's at once active and truly palpable for the audience, is how you understand the phrase you're performing: What's the highpoint? What's the air shape you're aiming for? What's the tone color you're trying to achieve? Where are the points of tension and relaxation? What's the rhythmic framework underneath? and so forth. (I wonder if someone fussing over ligature screws could confidently answer this by no means exhaustive list of questions. If not, perhaps some reorganization of priorities is called for.)
And in the end, ligature screws aren't going to help anyone shape a phrase a particular way. So sure, your mileage may vary. And you can collect thousands of bells, ligatures, and screws of all sorts in the same way someone might collect stamps: things to have simply for the pleasure of collecting. But if you're serious about clarinet playing, it, like other forms of collecting, can quickly become a pointless time suck.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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