 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-02 11:09
Hi,
I've been watching the developments at COP26 with interest.
I see they've just made an agreement to stop and reverse deforestation. But some people are saying that deforestation will always continue, as long as there is demand for the products like palm oil, soy and beef, that are grown on deforested land.
One of my great regrets is that I didn't realise my clarinet was made from a really amazing rainforest tree until after I bought it. I keep thinking that one day I would like to have its twin A clarinet, but obviously if I bought one of those, then I'd be encouraging the industry to fell yet another amazing tree to replace it.
I wondered if the clarinet community might have it's own little COP26 meeting and make a firm pledge to stop buying solid wood clarinets, so at to put an end to our part in driving deforestation? If we all agreed to switch to clarinets made from stuff like the greenline wood then perhaps we could push the manufacturers to stop cutting down whole big trees to make professional clarinets.
I wondered if I could just put this out there, as a thought?
Thanks!
Jennifer
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Author: Late_returner
Date: 2021-11-02 14:58
Yes it is such a shame.
We will have to learn to live with different "woods" anyway, once they have all gone.
I was told that the actual felling of "a woodwind" tree is only a minor part of the forest devastation caused by its extraction. For the environment, any indiginous people, wildlife, much more damage comes from the need to construct the roads and perhaps camps that are needed to access its location and extraction. And then the new roads are there to encourage further development. So in a real sense commercially valuable trees may be the catalyst developers seek..
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-02 15:05
Crikey, I hadn't thought of that.
Is there any significant movement in the clarinet community to say "enough is enough" and to walk away from using solid wood clarinets entirely? It seems as though there should be.
I mean presumably if we all said we refused to buy solid wood clarinets any more then the manufacturers would be able to switch their R&D entirely to greenline type materials, and then they'd get really good alternatives much more quickly.
The other possibilities I suppose, is that carbon pricing will be introduced and the price of solid wood clarinets will go through the roof. But I worry that then solid wood clarinets will be like ivory, with people harvesting the wood illegally to avoid the carbon pricing.
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-02 18:15
Hi Seabreeze,
Thanks, yes that second link to the FSC-certified blackwood looks very promising.
I wonder if we could get more about that kind of thing into the forum at least, so that when people ask us which clarinets they should buy, we could be pushing the environmentally friendly options harder? It seems as though it probably matters a lot.
Jen
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-02 18:22
The agreement that they have just committed to at COP26 is summarised as "World leaders have agreed a deal that aims to halt and reverse global deforestation over the next decade "
I suppose if that actually works as they intend, then that means that it will be much harder for people to get hold of the African blackwood. I reckon that might mean that prices of whole wood clarinets might go through the roof for a bit, which would drive improvement in the development of environmentally friendly manufacturing processes.
I suppose that's the hope anyway.
I'm glad clarinets are accoustic at least. We don't need to worry about getting them to stop running on fossil fuels. :-)
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-02 22:27
This is a good article:
https://www.yamaha.com/en/csr/feature/feature_04/
It's about Yamaha trying to work with a community in Africa to run a sustainable African Blackwood forest. That seems like the way that things should be.
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-02 22:31
This is a page about the place where the trees are growing. It even lists whether they have roads and schools and a health centre.
https://www2.cifor.org/redd-case-book/case-reports/tanzania/mpingo-conservation-development-initiative-combining-redd-pfm-fsc-certification-southeastern-tanzania/
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-02 22:39
This lady has been to see the place and explains what it's like.
She says that if we want to help we should all demand that any clarinet we consider buying should be made from FSC-certified wood.
https://www.cassgb.org/features/post/mpingo-magic/
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Author: Bennett ★2017
Date: 2021-11-03 04:07
You could consider a Buffet Greenline clarinet which, as I understand it, is mostly made of grenadilla sawdust and resins or glue of some sort to bind the sawdust together. As I understand it, they play and cost just like the 'real' thing.
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Author: Max S-D
Date: 2021-11-03 06:58
I've felt for a while now that the clarinet world is going to need to start figuring out its non-wood options for high end clarinets now. I would guess that clarinets are not making a big difference in the overall consumption of these woods compared to furniture, knife handles, etc, but I do suspect that there will come a time when Mpingo of sufficient quality isn't consistently available and we'll be forced to do move on if we haven't yet.
At this point, we know that a good clarinet doesn't have to be made of wood. Whether that's the hard rubber Ridenours or the Buffet's Greenline material, which is basically just resin. I don't think the sawdust filler is contributing much tonally to that wood, but it is a clever way of reusing what would go to waste and of lending it some marketing credence. I'd like to see more manufacturers look into new materials for their high end instruments, hopefully with an eye towards durability and sustainability.
It's usually interesting when engaged craftspeople have no choice but to veer away from "what we've always done." We've definitely seen kind of a renaissance of American handcrafted mouthpieces in the couple of years since Zinner shut down operations. Mouthpiece makers couldn't keep using those blanks, so they had no choice but to create new designs from the ground up. Now we have a lot of great and interesting mouthpieces on the market that are much more differentiated from each other.
I hope that clarinet manufacturers are up to the task in the same way. Or maybe this will be a chance for someone new to enter the market.
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Author: Hurstfarm
Date: 2021-11-03 21:25
FWIW, I have switched to a pair of greenline Legendes as my front line instruments based entirely on how they played. In selecting them I started from a position where (1) I was sure I wouldn’t buy Buffets and (2) a prejudice against alternatives to wood. We should set aside our prejudices as alternatives can make very fine instruments.
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-04 00:08
Hurstfarm, that's brilliant. Thanks for such a positive post.
I looked on the Buffet website and I saw that they are making clarinets out of other kinds of wood too, which seem like a great idea. I had no idea that they did that.
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Author: Reese Oller
Date: 2021-11-04 00:38
You know, I think you're right. I have learned about supply and demand, and what you say makes sense. If we abandon the grenadilla clarinets, maybe they will focus more on better alternatives.
Post Edited (2021-11-04 00:59)
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Author: Max S-D
Date: 2021-11-04 01:24
> You could make a syntheic clarinet, but is it still a clarinet?
Is it still a clarinet? That’s a stupid question. Of course it is. Beginners don’t start on “pre-clarinets” until they graduate to clarinets do they?
Post Edited (2021-11-04 01:46)
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-04 13:40
Hi Reese and Hurstfarm,
I think you're totally right there. The thing that everybody is saying about COP26 is that the politicians can make rules and deals until they're blue in the face, but until the consumers stop paying people for goods and services that drive climate change, the problem is never going to go away.
From looking online, I think may even be possible to use Grenadilla, as long as it is farmed wood from an FSC-certified source.
There are so many threads on here about which clarinet people should buy to get a great sound. I wonder if we could gather together all the information that people need so they can buy a clarinet that doesn't drive the destruction of critical tropical forests and drive climate change in other ways?
I have written to Buffet and Yamaha to ask for up to date information from them. I will post it here if I get anything back. My own Yamaha receipt says nothing about it being FSC-certified wood, but it looks as though Yamaha are switching to that, or may already have switched.
I looked online to see which other manufacturers I should write to, but it turns out that there are a huge number of them.
I wondered if anyone else here might have contacts in other companies that they could ask directly for information about how those companies are trying to get to Net Zero? (I mean how they are getting to the point where their company is not driving climate change.)
Thanks
Jen
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-04 14:01
I just also wrote to the contact address at Peter Eaton Clarinets to ask what their plan is.
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-04 14:07
I was discussing this with my husband yesterday, and he was saying that Sweden has just announced that the 300,000 oak trees that they planted one hundred and fifty years ago, so as to have a constant supply of wood for warship are now ready. So there's a whole big supply of farmed 150-year old wood there, that is not strictly needed for it's original planned use. Just goes to show that the planning needed to make serious wooden kit really takes rather a long time.
This is the article I think:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/visingso-oak-forest
Post Edited (2021-11-04 14:11)
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-04 16:01
The other thing I wondered is - if greenline is made of grenadilla wood powder and some kind of glue, would it make sense to gather up all the old clarinets that no longer work, and send them all to the manufacturers to use as starting material for new instruments?
I mean I have a 100 year old clarinet here made from wonderful old wood, and it's doing nothing but taking up space unfortunately, as it really doesn't work any more. If I could save a rainforest tree by sending it to a manufacturer to grind up and turn into a new greenline-type clarinet, then I would gladly do it. I'm sure Mr E.J. Albert, who made it, would approve.
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Author: smokindok
Date: 2021-11-04 16:05
SunnyDaze wrote:
“I just also wrote the contact address at Peter Eaton Clarinets to ask what their plan is.”
Has Mr. Eaton has found someone to purchase and assume management of the business? That would be great news.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2021-11-04 18:19
As Max S-D stated, the sawdust in the Greenline material probably doesn't make much difference so I doubt that the type of sawdust matters much at all. In fact we may find that sawdust from less dense wood works better (just throwing that out there.... don't know).
..............Paul Aviles
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-04 22:07
This is a nice interview with Olivier Patey where he says how much he enjoys playing a Buffet Legende in Boxwood (buxus as he calls it, which is the Genus name for box.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAId0NrfCZI
It seems as though Buffet are diversifying into a number of different kinds of wood. Maybe that is to help avoid deforestation, or because it is now harder to get African blackwood. I'm not sure.
For people like me who are new-ish here, this is Olivier Patey showing that he knows a great deal about how to handle a clarinet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya4y4xJ6OxA
This video shows the kind of boxwood clarinet that Mozart might have expected to see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3NCGSvKHCQ
Post Edited (2021-11-04 22:15)
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Author: Hurstfarm
Date: 2021-11-05 00:05
Hanson has been FSC certified since 2011, claiming a world first for the industry:
https://hansonclarinets.com/about-us/
Sunnydaze - Peter Eaton has now retired from clarinet making so not planning to add to his stocks, but I believe still hoping to sell the business on to someone with similar goals - although with Peter’s exacting standards and the level of competition I fear that person will be hard to find.
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-05 00:08
Hurstfarm - that's great about Hanson, I didn't know that.
Thanks for saying about Peter Eaton, I didn't know that he was retired. I had only heard that he made great clarinets, so thought it would be good to ask him first, along with Buffet and Yamaha.
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2021-11-05 00:43
The ICA editor just pointed me in the direction of this: http://www.darajamusicinitiative.org/
I don't completely understand what it does. but it's something to do with preserving African blackwood.
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