Author: Ken Shaw
Date: 1999-07-20 23:41
Kontragirl wrote:
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I was talking with a friend about plastic clarinets and wooden clarinets. She said that theoretically, plastic clarinets have better tone than wooden ones, or they wouldn't have started making them. Could this be true?
Kg -
Not better overall, but better for specific purposes. A plastic instrument can play very well -- superbly well if you count the Buffet Greenline as plastic (which of course it is). Plastic is cheaper and more uniform than wood, and it is also more uniform from batch to batch. It can be molded rather than drilled. It's more resistant to young players' clumsiness and abuse. It doesn't warp or crack. It can be machined to finer tolerances.
The problem, of course, is that with the exception of the Greenline, there have been few first class plastic clarinets made. The situation is quite different with other "wood"winds. The top oboe makers often charge more for plastic than wood, and Heckel bassoons have been lined with plastic for 100 years.
Wood feels and looks wonderful, and great instruments are made of it. However, acoustically it has no inherent advantage over plastic, at least on instruments like the clarinet where little or nothing is contributed to the sound by vibration of the body of the instrument.
Nevertheless, it's harder to get a really fine plastic clarinet than it is to get an equally fine wood one. The problem is that the best repair people are used to working on wood. Plastic requires different skills and different tools.
Also, since plastic has no grain (or at least a much finer grain than wood), the surfaces tend to be shiny and the tone holes have clean, smooth, sharp edges. This is actually a bad thing for the clarinet. Scientific experiments, particularly by Arthur Benade, showed that a clarinet sounds more "clarinetty" when the bore is not perfectly smooth, and in particular where the transition between the tone holes and the bore is slightly rounded off. This happens more or less automatically with wood, but not nearly so much with plastic.
Nevertheless, it can be done. Listen to the contrabass clarinet playing on the Stoltzman CDs. Of course the player (Dennis Smylie) is the best contra player there is, but he has to have a horn to play on. That horn is an el-cheapo plastic contra that Kalmen Opperman told me he spent months working on to get exactly the right surface texture in the bore, to flare (undercut) the tone holes and to round off the edges of the tone holes. Kal says it's the only "artist" contra in the world.
And of course, the most sensitive part of the clarinet, the mouthpiece, has been made from hard rubber for years. In fact, Henry Lazarus, who was the finest player in London around the turn of the century, had his instruments made entirely of hard rubber.
The mpingo tree (the source of what we call grenadilla) grows very slowly, and the demand for it far exceeds the supply. Sooner or later, it will be too hard to get good quality grenadilla, and the clarinet makers will switch to plastic. A sign of the times is that Pedro Morales is now playing a Greenline.
Now if Luis Rossi would only start to use the Greenline material, or the material that Loree is using for its oboes. . . .
Best regards.
Ken Shaw
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The Clarinet BBoard
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