Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2009-11-26 12:20
Sometimes the best clarinet is one of the worst. I still own my first clarinet, a 1957 wooden Conn Director that my dad bought for me new, when I first started grade school band. He wanted to buy me a good instrument as an incentive and he chose that one with love. He didn't know that C. G. Conn had died, his widow had sold the company (but not the "C.G." part of its name) and the new Conns were all student-grade and not much good. Mine has serious, built-in intonation problems, including 12ths so wide you could herd a rhino through them. As an adult, I bought better clarinets, but I've kept that one, and always will keep it, for sentimental reasons.
Right now, I'm using that old Conn for regular practice. I stowed my bass winds and the other clarinets out of harm's way because my house is under construction. (We're replacing all the windows except the ones in the basment and two on the ground floor that we'd already replaced a few years ago. The old windows, from 1947, are steel-framed, with rust, multiple layers of peeling paint and after-market storm windows and screens that don't fit properly.) With construction in every room of the house except the basement, old books and fragile objects stowed and all the furniture that's normally near the windows moved, this place looks like the county dump. Because of construction delays, some due to weather, we're living with this mess for close to three weeks now, instead of the few days we expected. (We hope the crew will come back and get the heavy work done on Monday. Then Kevin and I will have 14 windows to finish, some with paint and some with stain.)
I'm glad I decided to use my most familiar old clarinet during this chaos and to practice familiar music. Though it's far from my best instrument, I'm playing better on that old Conn than I'd been playing on better clarinets. When I'm distracted, I can slip right back into the familiar, childhood work-arounds, automatically lipping some notes up and others down to compensate for the built-in wonkiness. Familiarity doesn't always breed contempt. Sometimes, it breeds security.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
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The Clarinet BBoard
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