 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2008-05-24 07:16
Hi
I'm trying to find why, historically, the clarient is a transposed instrument. Does anyone have any links to where I can read about that? Or briefly explain themselves? Is it because the first one was in C, and it continued from there? Was it simply decided (for example because of how music is written)? Something else completely?
Thanks!
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Author: NorbertTheParrot
Date: 2008-05-24 10:28
I'd be interested in the answer to this as well. More generally, I'd like to know when woodwinds were first treated as transposing instruments.
In Bach scores the trumpets, horns and timpani are treated as transposing instruments. However, the oboi d'amore and oboi da caccia are notated at concert pitch, the d'amores in treble clef and the da caccias in alto clef. Only late on (but when?) was the convention established to notate them both as transposing instruments in treble clef, d'amores in A and cors anglais in F, so the player could use the same fingering-to-written-note relationships as for the oboe.
Similarly, recorders are not transposing instruments (they may transpose by an octave, but not to a different key). The player must learn one set of fingering-to-written-note relationships for soprano and tenor, and another set for sopranino and alto. The soprano/tenor fingerings also apply, but in bass clef, for C-bass. The sopranino/alto fingerings also apply, but in bass clef, for F-bass.
In those days, it was common to use a variety of clefs rather than transposing notation. For example, alto recorder parts were sometimes notated in French violin clef - G4 on the bottom line (equivalent to bass clef two octaves up). A recorder player familiar with this notation can play a flute part without running out of low notes: the lowest note of a baroque flute is D4 (just below the stave in treble clef) and of an alto recorder is F4 (just below the stave in French violin clef). Effectively, the alto recorder is behaving as a transposing instrument in Eb, except that the player must mentally add three flats to the key signature. (I apologise if the gentle reader is completely baffled by this paragraph.)
I'm not sure whether the first clarinets were in C. The Molter concertos are for clarinet in D. Are they notated transposing in the original? No doubt modern editions are, but that tells us nothing.
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Author: Sang1Lee
Date: 2008-05-24 12:16
i thought it was because back in the day, clarinets didn't have nearly as many keys as they do now
so, in order to play in a key where you need to play a lot of flats and sharps, they would have to play on a different clarinet so it ends up in a nice key
look at all the pieces from back then, none of the pieces have like Db as key sig for the clarinet
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Author: BobD
Date: 2008-05-24 13:01
Off the top of my head and as I recall: In the beginning there was the C clarinet that allowed for no chromatics. Then clarinets were made in several different keys so as to play music written for each but fingerings were a problem. Eventually the Bb,E and C survived in the Soprano class and the Bb could play music written in any key. I am not an expert on the subject and, like you, await an expert's response.
Bob Draznik
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Author: Don Berger
Date: 2008-05-24 17:33
Please Search our archives for many discussions of why the Bb is the "preferred" cl, use "transposing instrument" to avoid the "how to" discussions. If thats not enough, prob. all of our "good books" will discuss the cl's history completely, Brymer has , as I recall, a chapter with the name A Transposing Instrument. I believe that among the several "soprano" cls, the Bb is the preferred "all-around" cl. PM thots, Don
Thanx, Mark, Don
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Author: NorbertTheParrot
Date: 2008-05-24 18:57
The responses above don't answer the question. They answer two related questions:
1) Why are clarinets made in so many different keys?
2) Why is the Bb clarinet preferred to the others?
I think clarnibass and I both know the answers to these two questions. We are asking two rather different questions, which are not clearly answered by the usual sources:
1) Why - and when - did transposing notation come to be applied to the clarinet at all? Just because clarinets are made in several different keys, that doesn't mean that transposing notation is essential. As I explained above, recorder players manage without it, as did oboists in Bach's day. Did clarinets use transposing notation from day one?
2) Why was it decided that the instrument whose lowest note is concert E3 (the instrument we now call a C clarinet) was the one that would be written untransposed? We are so used to the fact that it is, that we overlook the fact that there is nothing inevitable about it. The standard instrument is the one whose lowest note is concert D3 (the Bb clarinet); so why did musicians not adopt a notation in which this instrument was notated in concert pitch, and other clarinets in transposed notation relative to it: the C clarinet in D, the Eb clarinet in F and so on.
It would be nice to have answers from someone who can quote original (eighteenth century) sources, rather than "I thought it was" and "off the top of my head".
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Author: Alseg
Date: 2008-05-24 19:16
Look here for posting by Dan Leeson:
http://www.woodwind.org/clarinet/Klarinet/Postings.html#48
I am sure he 'splains it just fine....trouble is, the text is not available. Guess you gotta find the book in the library, or (I am sure preferably for Dan) "buy the book."
Former creator of CUSTOM CLARINET TUNING BARRELS by DR. ALLAN SEGAL
-Where the Sound Matters Most(tm)-
Post Edited (2008-05-24 19:18)
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Author: beejay
Date: 2008-05-24 22:04
I did a lot of research on this subject several years ago, and the following extract from a long article I wrote at the time covers most of the ground, I think.
"Clarinetists at the time played on relatively simple instruments of five keys, which required them to use complex fingering in order to obtain the full chromatic range of notes. They also needed several instruments tuned in various pitches, since the five-lever model was difficult to play in music requiring many sharps and flats. Similar problems existed for other woodwind instruments. Thus the golden age of wind playing was accompanied by many attempts to improve the instruments technically. Around 1791, Lefèvre added a sixth key to enable clarinetists to play the note of C sharp in the chalumeau register or G sharp in the higher register. To obtain these notes on a five-key clarinet was difficult, since it required the musician to half-stop a hole, as on a recorder. The six-key clarinet could compete technically with any other instrument at the time, and was so successful that it remained widely in use for the next quarter of a century.
When Iwan Müller asked the Paris Conservatoire in 1812 to approve the thirteen-key "clarinette omnitonique" that he had invented, Lefèvre was on the committee that turned it down. Müller claimed that his instrument would obviate the need for musicians to have several differently pitched clarinets. But the conservatoire rejected the argument, on the grounds that it would deprive composers of the resource provided by the contrasting tone colors of the different instruments.
Lefèvre considered that piercing more holes in the body of the clarinet would spoil the quality of the sound, a valid point at the time since intonation was particularly tricky for this instrument. The composer and teacher Heinrich Backofen said that a clarinet with more than six keys would lose its soul. The old instruments may have been simple, but they were in no way primitive. Virtuosi like Cavallini and Heinrich Baermann continued to perform on the old six-key models throughout their careers, despite the availability of mechanically more complex instruments. Those who take the trouble to master the old five- and six-key clarinets, or their reproductions, notice a distinctive soft expressiveness compared with the more powerful modern instruments. "To have a good result with an old instrument, you really have to play it like a recorder, with very little pressure," according to Michel Arrignon. "Therefore I think it must have been much less strident, and more sweet than the oboe, although with a piercing quality in the sound. I think this is what attracted Mozart. The sound of the old clarinet carries enormously well in the orchestra. And at the same time it is soft."
Müller, born in Estonia in 1786, had been a chamber musician at the Imperial Russian court at St. Petersburg before moving to Paris to promote his instrument. With the help of a clarinet-playing stockbroker, Marie-Pierre Petit, he opened a workshop, but failed to prosper and returned to a life of performing. He moved to London, where he married and settled down, played in a theater orchestra and wrote a clarinet method. He returned to Paris sometime after 1830 and later became first clarinetist at the Italian Theater before moving to Germany, where he continued to carry out improvements on his clarinet with the help of the instrument-maker Johann Adam Heckel. Despite the setback at the conservatory, Müller's instrument continued to have many eminent supporters, including the great French teacher and performer Frederic Berr, who wrote a method for it. Berr, who became head of the school of military music in Paris in 1836, incidentally introduced to France the German fashion of playing with the reed downwards instead of on top of the mouthpiece. Even Lefèvre, who was also a music instrument maker to the royal court, started producing the thirteen-key clarinet that he had rejected at the conservatory, and changed to the instrument himself late in his career.
If Klosé and Buffet created the classic French-system clarinet, Müller's instrument was the direct inspiration for the clarinets still used today in Germany and for the Albert-system clarinets that played such an important role in the early years of jazz. Among his many innovations, Müller replaced the flat brass flaps used to close holes on the six-key clarinets with the kind of pads found on modern instruments. For the waxed or silk cord used to tie reeds to the mouthpiece he substituted a metal ligature much like those used today. He also shaped his reeds, which until then had been quite stiff and square, in a way that would be familiar to modern clarinetists.
The most widely played wind instrument in the eighteenth century had been the flute, particularly in France where it seems that every gentleman had one, and every lady had a harp. Frederick the Great of Russia played the instrument, and he and his teacher Johann Joachim Quantz composed innumerable sonatas and concertos for it. Despite the improvements made by Jacques Hotteterre and the addition of a simple key mechanism, however, the wooden flute remained an old fashioned instrument that sounded bright in sharp keys and somewhat dull in flat keys. In the 1820s, however, an English flautist named Charles Nicholson was able to produce a very big and expressive sound from the old wooden flute by enlarging and rearranging the tone holes. One is speculating here, but Nicholson was the colleague and brother-in-law of the clarinetist Thomas Lindsay Willman, who first played the Mozart concerto in England, and may have been inspired by the more evolved clarinet mechanism and Willman's reputedly beautiful tone to improve the flute.
Theobold Boehm, a flautist in the Munich court orchestra and instrument maker, heard Nicholson during a visit to London in 1831 and was astonished by the volume of his tone. On returning to Munich, Boehm embarked on a radical reform of the flute, by carefully rearranging the position and the venting of the tone holes. Most significantly, he introduced the rings and long axles that allow holes to be closed and distant keys opened simultaneously. "Had I not heard him (Nicholson), probably the Boehm flute would never have been made," Boehm said later. His experiments changed the nature of the flute, giving it more volume and a brighter tone.
In Paris, Klosé quickly realized that this system could be the basis for an improvement on the unwieldy long and jointed levers of the thirteen-key clarinet, and sometime around 1837 began his historic cooperation with Louis-Auguste Buffet, who had already been in direct contact with Boehm. A prototype of their "clarinette à anneaux mobiles" (or clarinet with movable rings), as it was known, was shown at an exhibition in Paris in 1839 and received a medal . Buffet's and Klosé's design, patented in 1844, was not generally known as Boehm-system for another 20 years. It had twenty-four tone holes controlled by seventeen keys and six rings, rod axles on which all the keys were mounted, interlocked keys for the lowest notes and needle springs to control the action of the levers. This arrangement enables very precise and fast playing, eliminates the awkward cross-fingerings of the older instrument and enables adjacent notes to be played without the need to roll the finger from key to key.
The Boehm system was well suited to the clarinet but not to other instruments. In his book "Clarinet Acoustics," O.Lee Gibson said the new clarinet "was soon followed by oboes and bassoons made by leading Paris craftsmen utilizing Boehm's moveable rings and larger tone holes, but these instruments were almost invariably strident in their tones and did not succeed."
Klosé, who was at that time the solo clarinetist at the Italian Theater as well as being professor at the conservatory began the Buffet tradition of having a professional player test every instrument before it leaves the factory. He also wrote a monumental five-volume tutor that helped to establish the new clarinet. Both the tutor and the collections of studies that Klosé wrote for the use of his students remain widely in use. Klosé's successor at the Paris Conservatory, Cyrille Rose, was also a firm supporter of the Boehm-system clarinet and worked with Buffet to correct the proportions of the bore of the instrument to improve intonation. He wrote two renowned collections of studies and trained a stellar generation of clarinetists that included Prosper Aimart, Paul Jeanjean, Henri and Alexandre Selmer, Henri Paradis, Louis Cahuzac and the Gomez brothers from Spain, who popularized the Boehm-system instrument in England.
Despite the steadily increasing acceptance of the Boehm system in France, and more slowly elsewhere, other kinds of clarinet continued to be developed, and in 1846 the Belgian instrument maker, Adolphe Sax, patented the saxophone, intended for military bands.
Eugene Albert of Brussels refined the thirteen-key clarinet around the middle of the century, and his firm exported large numbers to the United States. In the 1860s, Carl Baermann, a fellow court musician with Boehm at Munich, set about improving Müller's design. With the instrument maker Georg Ottensteiner, he created an eighteen-key clarinet that was popular in Germany for the rest of the century. Richard Muehlfeld, whom Brahms called his "Prima Donna," played one of these instruments. The Baermann system was improved by Oskar Oehler in Germany and given twenty-two keys and five rings. It is this system that is most commonly used in Germany and Austria today.
Attempts to change the Boehm system have come to very little, however, a testimony to the efficiency of the design by Klosé and Buffet. Their prototype instrument has sadly been lost, but very early examples of the Boehm clarinet bear an extraordinary resemblance with those being produced today."
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2008-05-25 09:43
Maybe you noticed that the it was also me who asked the question in Alseg's link. I'm trying to get the article Dan mentioned.
Thanks beejay, that was very interesting, although it still doesn't explain exactly what I was asking. It isn't clear if during all that time mentioned in your article there was a familiy of clarinets, or what key the clarinet(s?) was/were. Actually there is no mention of any specific key of any clarinet.
I am still not sure if the first clarinet was in C, simply an intuitive/automatic decision by the maker, then clarinets in other keys were made for various reasons (to fit different scales better, etc.) and eventually the Bb "survived" the most. Or was the first clarinet, or family of clarinets, already built as tranposition instruments? As I wrote, I'm especially interested in the "why".
Hopefully I will be able to find Dan's article and find out the answer.
Thanks!
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Author: NorbertTheParrot
Date: 2008-05-25 10:28
clarnibass - part of the answer to your question (which is also my question) is given in the first chapter of "The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet".
This suggests that the first orchestral use of the chalumeau was of a soprano instrument with a range from F4 to about Bb5. Its lowest note would thus be the same as that of an alto recorder, though the instrument must have been closer to the size of a sopranino recorder. If this instrument were notated at concert pitch, as page 11 of the book implies, the fingering-to-written-note relationships would have been very similar to those of an alto recorder - all holes closed giving F4, the open note giving G5.
The book also shows a picture of a tenor chalumeau; its key is not stated, but it is said to be about the size of an alto recorder. It seems reasonable to assume that this would sound an octave lower than the soprano, the lowest note being F3 and the open note G4. The book does not state what notation was used, but it seems likely to me that it was also notated at concert pitch (i.e. not as an octave transposition from the soprano). This is exactly the same pitch and notation as a modern clarinet in C.
This suggests to me that the tenor chalumeau may have set the fingering rule - open note is written G4 - that was subsequently used for all the clarinets.
It'd be nice to have input from someone with a lot more knowledge than I have.
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Author: beejay
Date: 2008-05-25 10:55
Clarnibass,
To answer your question, yes a whole family of clarinets evolved during the eighteenth century, because composers selected certain keys for certain effects -- for example Molter's use of the bright D-clarinet in his concertos. Composers did not see the clarinet as a single instrument, but as a diverse family of instruments each with specific tonal qualities, just as Mozart, Richard Strauss or Stockhausen used the basset horn rather than the clarinet for its different coloration.
In rejecting the "omnitonic" clarinet invented by Iwan Müller in 1812 to replace the several clarinets pitched in different keys, the Paris conservatoire said: "clarinets of different sizes produce different characters of sound; thus the C clarinet has a brilliant and lively tone; the B flat clarinet is suited to the noble or melancholy type of music, the A clarinet is more pastoral in character. Undoubtedly Mr. Müller's new clarinet, if it were universally adopted, would deprive composers of the opportunity to make use of these distinct characteristics."
Much more recently, according to Paul Hindemith, the clarinet remains "The only woodwind instrument that has a representative in each section of the musical tone range, from the bass clarinet to the E-flat soprano, or even (with the inclusion of two extreme outsiders) from the contrabass clarinet to the small A-flat piccolo."
L.J.Francoeur's Diapason général des instruments à vent of 1772 said the tonalities then commonly in use were A, B flat, B natural, C, D, F, and E natural. There was also a "grande clarinette" in G. The Italian carabinieri still use the tiny A-flat clarinet.
The B-flat clarinet was widely used as a solo instrument in concertos by Stamitz, Beer, Tausch and Eichner. Mozart was first to use the A-clarinet as soloist in the quintet of 1789 -- possibly because his friend Stadler possessed such an instrument. After the French revolution, Napoleon decreed that every regimental band should include clarinets -- a minimum of six, I believe, and there were more than 100 student clarinettists in the newly created Paris conservatoire to meet the need. The B-flat clarinet was found to be the most suitable for the purpose in conjunction with the long-established oboe, and the methods written around that period by Vanderhagen, Blasius and Lefèvre (still available today, and very good too) were for that instrument. Thus the b-flat instrument was well-established as the standard by the beginning of the 19th century, often used with pieces de rechange for playing in difficult keys.
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Author: htoyryla
Date: 2008-05-25 10:58
I recall that the clarinet was initially mainly played in the clarion register, but am unable to check this right now. If this is the case, and the soprano chalumeau would start from F, then the clarion register would start from C. Likewise, when on a modern C clarinet you put all fingers down (similar to as in a recoder) you will get a C in the clarion register. This makes sense to me but I have no evidence that this is the historical reason.
Of course in a modern clarinet, there is the e key which is ignored in the above reasoning. But in many modern instruments, written C is not the lowest note: think of saxophones and also flutes with the B key. "C" position. It is more that C is the base position when you have all fingers down as in a recorder.
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Author: Don Berger
Date: 2008-05-25 14:02
Thank you very much, beejay, for your research and posting this info for all of us to ponder and learn. GBK, I'd like to suggest that at least some of this be placed in our "Keepers" for future reference and question answering. Other fine sources re: our instruments ancestry-development are Al Rice's books on the Barouque and Classical Clarinet and of course Groves Dict. of Music. Don
Thanx, Mark, Don
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2008-05-26 12:18
Thank you everyone and especially beejay.
So it sounds like it's pretty much the obvious explaination, but the only missing part is, whether the very first clarinet was in C, because whoever invented it never thought to make it transposed (which makes sense, why would they).
I understand originally clarinets in different keys were made for their different types of tones. So I'm wondering (if anyone even knows the details of this history) how long it took from the first clarinet until they started making clarinets in other keys (and how it happened), and if when they started making those the original (C?) clarinet was already a known instrument? Or maybe the original maker(s) of the first (C?) clarinet imediately made other clarinets too, before the first one was even known?
By the way beejay, is it possible to get a copy of your article? Sounds like it is something worth having locally, with a lot of information that maybe isn't so easy to find.
Thanks!
Nitai
Post Edited (2008-05-26 12:24)
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Author: beejay
Date: 2008-05-26 14:15
Clarnibass,
To answer your question about the pitch of the first clarinet ...
If we accept with Anthony Baines (Woodwind Instruments and their History) that the first clarinet was invented either by J.C. Denner of Nuremberg or his son, then it was almost certainly in C, as indicated by a surviving Denner instrument at Munich.
Denner was well-known as a recorder maker, and it may be that the first clarinet was based on a treble recorder, with approximately the same length and dimensions as a recorder, rather than on a chalumeau, which was approximately half as long.
The word chalumeau in 17th-century French meant either a pipe or a bagpipe chanter. Baines speculates that Denner may have fitted a bagpipe reed from Bohemia onto one of his treble recorders. The genius, of course, was the invention of the speaker key, enabling the instrument to be played in the "clarone" register. There is some confusion about the origins, because Denner also probably improved the Chalumeau by giving it a speaker key and a replaceable cane reed. This instrument was known at the time as a calandrone, or lark. Pairs of such instruments were used, usually to convey pastoral scenes, by Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, Gluck and Hasse.
Musicians were used to carrying around whole collections of recorders, which we know from surviving cases, which resemble arrow quivers. This would have been true also for early two-key clarinets, which were most effective in their home tonality. Clarinets came in at least 27 different keys.
The development of the classical clarinet after 1750, with the elongation of the bell and the addition of a long B key did away with need for such a huge variety of keys because their intonation was so much better. The commonest totalities in the late eighteenth-century five-key clarinets were B flat and C. The A clarinet was rare, and usually formed by the addition of a section to a b-flat instrument.
There is evidence that Stadler preferred to play in the low register, and I think he may have experimented with A clarinets because of their more mellow tone, which we can hear to its best in Mozart's clarinet quintet. Stadler also worked with the court instrument maker, Lotz, on developing a basset clarinet in A, descending to C, which we are now fairly certain is the instrument for which Mozart wrote the clarinet concerto, converting the first movement from its original sketch for a basset horn in G.
One of the latest additions to the clarinet family was the E flat, which was generally adopted in the 19th century to replace an earlier instrument in F in bands and orchestras.
If you are interested in following up any of this, an excellent instroduction s O.Lee Gibson's Clarinet Accoustics (Indiana University Press).
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Author: S. Friedland
Date: 2008-05-27 13:32
Anthony Baines, "Woodwind Insruments and Their history", published by Dover, pages 45-48 give a very reasonable rationale for transposing instruments, and is acceptable from a logical standpoint. We are talking mostly about historical compositional and performance practice from which all of these instruments developed.
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The Clarinet Pages
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