Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2010-11-03 17:23
My worst "one that got away" story is about an 1898 Buffet E-flat soprano clarinet I bought for a low price at the Civitan flea market. Unfortunately, the flea market dealer had already beaten me out for that clarinet at the Georgetown flea market a few weeks earlier. (Georgetown was a much bigger flea market then than now. The athletic department of the Duke Ellington School has now taken over more than half of what used to be a parking lot where the flea market set up.) We'd seen each other, we'd stopped and chatted and, as an unspoken courtesy, we headed up different rows. Oops. I picked the wrong row. I arrived at the booth with the clarinet just in time to see him hand over the money. The clarinet had no case. This clarinet was manufactured back when tenons were wrapped with string instead of being corked. This clarinet was in "garage horn" condition. The strings wrapping these tenons were worn down to just about nothing, making the tenons loose, so (as he showed me the purchase and politely but happily gloated over beating me out) I offered him a plastic bag I carry with me. He said nah, he'd just carry the clarinet straight to his car. It'd be fine.
Uh-huh. We went our separate ways again. A few minutes later, my husband saw the man scrambling around on his hands and knees on the asphalt parking lot, picking up pieces of ... something. And a few weeks later, the same clarinet turned up in that purchaser-dealer's own booth at Civitan. The mouthpiece, formerly in pristine condition, had been glued back together, lumpily. It's unplayable, with many missing chips filled in with an overly-enthusiastic application of gap-filling adhesive. The good news: the clarinet itself hadn't been damaged, the dealer only wanted a little bit more than what he'd paid and the broken mouthpiece, a vintage Penzell-Mueller hard rubber, wasn't the original, which would've been made of wood for a Buffet clarinet of that vintage. The bad news: I haven't found another mouthpiece that will play in tune on this instrument. Of course I don't know that the Penzell-Mueller mouthpiece would've played in tune, either.
But I can't complain too much, because the other half of the "got beaten" story would've been from his point of view, about how buying the clarinet was a meager revenge for my buying the 1926 C. G. Conn bass saxophone a few minutes before he arrived at the somewhat creepy pre-death estate sale.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
Post Edited (2010-11-03 17:30)
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The Clarinet BBoard
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