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Re: K.L.LEROY mouthpiece

Author: seabreeze
Date: 2018-12-11 05:35

We need a lot more academic scholarship to be devoted to the early history of clarinet mouthpiece design and refacing in America and elsewhere. I for one would like to know the dimensions of the crystal mouthpiece H. Klose reputedly played and recommended. Somewhere in my notes I cribbed the name "Charly" but have never gotten very far with that. I can tell you that some names to reckon with in the US before the Kaspars and Matson were Harry E. O'Brien (lived from 1884 to 1957), Wolfe Tanninbaum, Otto Link, Robert Jenny, and Ben Harrod. O'Brien played in the bands of Sousa and Bohumir Kryl (a cornet virtuoso) and made and adjusted mouthpieces for many of their players. He wrote a few amusing accounts of some of the odd requests he got such as making a mouthpiece that produced a tone "as if covered by a veil." All of this and more deserves far better and more detailed documentation than is currently available. I'm pretty sure that those old facings, H, HS, A, and A* (and maybe the S also) on Selmer mouthpieces with the logo at the bottom and the big A-shaped chamber inside were hand faced, at least some of the time, by Alexander Selmer or his brother Henri. In Paris, Henri Paradis (who was making recordings as early as 1901) had a few mouthpieces that bore his name and those may have been hand faced. Some Alelandais, Vega, Robert, and Leroy may have been as well. According to Ramon Wodkowski, the Woodwind Company in New York was instrumental in making a machine that could face mouthpieces with little human intervention or finishing (see his blog for more). I should imagine that before developments in mechanical engineering of this kind, all mouthpieces were faced and refaced by hand-- sometimes skillfully, often, perhaps, less so.

Post Edited (2019-09-08 18:22)

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