Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2023-10-03 09:56
Hi Fuzzy,
I wondered if there might have been other factors at play that are hard for us to figure out?
A relative of mine who is a singing teacher says that really old recordings of soprano singers sound very different because they all wore very tight corsets and couldn't breathe properly. I figure the clarinetists were probably all men, but they may have had other stuff going on that we don't know about.
I'm thinking, for example, during some periods the hall would have been full of people smoking cigarettes, and dense smoke outside making the buildings black and affecting breathing. At other periods there would have been respiratory diseases circulating that might have affected things - for example back in the 1910s there would have been diphtheria, TB, and the new strain of flu, and later on there would have been polio doing the rounds. Michael Flanders of Flanders and Swann blasted on through as a professional singer, despite having difficulty breathing because of having had polio.
When there was no recorded music, there would have been huge demand for performance in dance halls, so the players must have been really performing a lot, to large audiences, who might mostly have been dancing rather than sitting staring at the musicians.
I suppose that realistically some of the guys that we hear on old recordings would have had some or all of these things to deal with, and that's before we take into account two world wars and the depression.
Once I think about all that, I can totally get what Karl says about playing for projection and dynamics, and less about the covered sound for close recording equipment.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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