At 8:23 AM -0400 6/6/07, Christopher Smith wrote:
Clarinet in D would be good, too.
??????? Never seen one, and never seen a part for one. Where do
you find it?
Mahler, Berlioz, among others. Late 19th C stuff. Yup, it's rare
these days, but you see it in historical repertoire. I just recopied
a D part for Eb clarinet for Mahlers 6th Symphony, by request of the
clarinetist, as it gets pretty tough to transpose at sight. The
fingerings get nuts for an Eb player, which is why I suppose it was
originally written for D clarinet.
It isn't the fingerings so much (although they certainly DO get
slithy!) that prompted making clarinets in different keys, although
to a non-player it might seem obvious on the face of it. (No
professional would accept his or her inability to play any fingering
combination in existence! And as I try to impress on my recorder
students, there are no difficult fingerings, just difficult fingering
combinations.)
To anyone who has actually played a simple-system clarinet (and yes,
I own one in C at 440 and have played it, or rather played WITH it!),
the problem is immediately self-evident. Cross fingerings
(chromatics) are just as bright as the natural scale notes on
recorder and early oboe, slightly muffled on the simple system flute
(which is why they added about one key per generation), but are
dreadfully dull and muffled on a simple-system clarinet. So to get a
consistent scale in any key, prior to the Albert or Boehm systems,
you had to have a clarinet in the key of the composition.
People make too much of fingering difficulties, like the outdated
notion that flutes and piccolos are more at home in sharp keys than
in flat keys. Never true with Boehm system, and not true of simple
system either. After all, the third sharp is also the third flat!
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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