Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2007-02-23 12:48
Got curious about this question, and borrowed my husband's electronic tuner. (He doesn't like an electronic tuner any more than I do, but finds it useful for competing with other string players' electronic tuners at quartet bouts--oops, I mean rehearsals.) I only tested a few clarinets and only Bb clarinets.
The first clarinet I ever owned, a 1957 wooden Conn, has built-in intonation problems, with wide 12ths and wonky throat tones. With the original Conn plastic mouthpiece (how I wish a teacher had known enough to tell me to accidentally leave it where the family car would back over it...), that clarinet is about 440 Hz. The Hite Premiere mouthpiece noticibly improves the tone quality, but doesn't affect the concert A pitch. Old, unmarked, shorter and rounder mouthpieces from the 1930s make the throat tone intonation problems worse and throw the clarinet so flat overall that it's useless for playing with a modern piano or ensemble: 438 or even lower.
A plastic Bundy from the 1980s with the original (atrocious) Bundy mouthpiece squealed in at 444 Hz! I guess the theory was that beginners play way flat, so better make the clarinet way sharp. That clarinet also has very wide 12ths. With the vastly better Hite Premiere mouthpiece, this clarinet steps back to 442 Hz, a useful pitch. The 12ths are still still pretty wide, but the instrument is usable, because it's very easy to bend the pitch with this clarinet and this mouthpiece. I don't play the Bundy much, but when I do, I never use the Bundy mouthpiece.
My 1937 Bb Buffet, played with mouthpieces from the 1920s or 1930s, is 440 Hz, and goes out of tune with itself (especially the throat tones--some going flat and some sharp) if I try to sharpen it overall by using a modern mouthpiece.
A wooden Selmer Signet Special, probably from the mid-1980s, with a W. Sumner "Accusticut" No. 3 mouthpiece, is bang-on 440 Hz and a good clarinet with that mouthpiece. With the Hite Premiere, it's a smidge sharper--although by the time I tested it, I caught myself cheating, bending the pitch higher with embouchure because the look of those two mouthpieces put the expectation in my head that the Hite would play sharper, even though in fact I think it didn't! But that crummy Bundy mouthpiece threw the whole instrument out of tune with itself *and* raised the pitch to just under 442 Hz.
A plastic Yamaha 20 with a Yamaha 4C mouthpiece, from the 1980s, plays sharp, 442 Hz, and doesn't play in tune with itself with any of my other mouthpieces. The natural pitch may be even higher, because this was the last clarinet I tested, and I think by that time, I'd started to fixate on centering the needle and was compulsively pulling the pitch down. Object lesson in the unwisdom of looking at a dial while practicing instead of *listening*....
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
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The Clarinet BBoard
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