Author: Julian ibiza
Date: 2023-06-01 22:35
SecondTry,
I like that you've raised this question
I think that everybody tends to have their head up their Grenadillas a bit on the matter of what a clarinet should be made of .When Tom Ridenour got into hard rubber , apparently he believed that by today wood would basically be a thing of the past , hard rubber being eminently better in his view .He also said that sound quality in design comes down largely to knowing the material you are using and working with it .
Leslie Craven told me that during his last ten years or so as first clarinet for the National Welsh Opera ( he's now retired) , he played all Ridenour horns just because he loved their tone, response and great tuning and I believe that there are quite a number of eminent musicians who now favor the Libertas over any Grenalla equivalent.
This is hard rubber not plastic , but the point is that materials other than Grenadilla CAN be high performers which means that Grenadilla is not the magical ingredient.There are quite a few musicians out there that don't believe that the material an instrument is made of is central to its tone quality, but that this comes down to other things .
Grenadilla can crack , and it's going to start cracking more and more as the increasing scarcity of this wood results in compromised quality selection for woodwind manufacturing. This probably means that if you now buy a Mopane horn , it will be made with a better piece of wood than its Grenadilla counterpart. Perhaps you won't be that sorry soul with the cracked horn .
But as SecondTry pointed out , why not just reach for the Greenline ...or one of the other non wood instruments . No cracking ,no blow-out , no environmental bad conscience.
Tom Ridenour is not a maverick. He's a clever common sense man of the times in an age marked by similar people . But he appears as something of a maverick because he's worked in a conservatively minded field .
Julian Griffiths
Tel. 34 696 798 853
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The Clarinet BBoard
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