 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: jez
Date: 2002-08-06 03:52
The extra key is attached to the 3rd finger ring and enables low E flat/high B flat to be played with thumb 1st & 3rd fingers.
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Author: Ralph Katz
Date: 2002-08-10 03:35
As I remember, B-C's 1968 European catalog listed three models: the "BC-20" for orchestral playing, the "Continental" for chamber music, and the "Super-Dynaction" for jazz. It would take me a couple of hours of digging to see if I still have it.
I have what appears to be an A Continental that I bought new that year from their storefront on Passage du Grand Cerf in Paris. My tour went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa, but I went to Buffet and got a clarinet. I had just enough cash to get home, but not enough to buy a case, so carried the instrument through Paris for the rest of the day in the butcher paper tube it came in. Total cost including duty: $147. I had less than $5 in my pocket when I arrived two days later at Detroit Metro.
There was some confusion as to what exactly I was ordering, for these reasons. B-C only sold it to me because I ordered it from outside the US, from a country which did not have an exclusive importer, and where English was not the principal language. They had no reason to assume that I was a US citizen, or that the instrument would be brought into the US. This despite my paying in $US travellers checks.
I liked the instrument, right up until I got my 1980-vintage R-13 A on approval. The A Continental has a reasonably nice sound, but I have to work rather hard to get any sort of volume out of it. Other people who I have loaned the Continental to have also complained about intonation, especially that the low notes play flat, something I have not really noticed. The wood Artley I inherited from my father is a much better all-around instrument.
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Author: Ralph Katz
Date: 2002-08-10 12:51
P.S. here is another story regard to intonation of the B-C Continental A clarinet.
In 1971, my R-13 went out for overhaul, and the keywork was delayed at the re-platers. I was in the University of Michigan Varsity Band, the lowest level band, for non-music makers, and managed to borrow an instrument from the marching band. But just before our concert in Hill Auditorium, they needed my loaner back. Unable to borrow another instrument, I sat down and learned to play our entire concert on my B-C Continental A clarinet.
Who knows why, maybe just for shock value, maybe to brag, a week beforehand, I decided to tell the conductor what was going on. He was aghast and told me flat out that it would be unacceptably out of tune and I couldn't play the concert unless I came up with a B flat instrument. But then, he relented when I told him I had been playing rehearsals for the last three weeks on the A instrument. I could very well be the only person to play a UM band concert in Hill Auditorium on an A clarinet.
Regards.
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