![]() Brymer, however, contends that “one can prove scientifically that the sounds of the B flat and A clarinets are identical,” and attributes any perceived timbral difference to preconceived notions. Colin Lawson points out that composers as orchestrationally astute as Francis Poulenc and Richard Strauss have scored for B-flat and A clarinets to be used simultaneously, with the clear intention of contrasting the instruments’ timbres. The other possibility is that composers selected either B-flat or A clarinets to exploit a difference, real or perceived, in tone quality. ( Jack Brymer is willing to leave the decision up to an even lower-level employee: “There is a fairly strong school of thought which suggests it is an archaic hang-over and that the composer should simply write the score out in concert pitch and leave it to the copyist to sort the matter out.”) The clarinetist might pick his or her preferred instrument for the situation, regardless of which is specified by the composer. The question, then, is this: for a given piece of music, did the composer simply choose a specific clarinet in an attempt to make life easier for the clarinetist? If so, it may no longer be necessary to use two clarinets to do the job of one, with the modern instrument’s more sophisticated keywork giving it more chromatic freedom. ![]() The problem that remains is that the clarinet has accumulated two hundred and fifty years of repertoire, some of which calls for the instrument in B-flat, some of which calls for the instrument in A, and even some that calls for a little of each. But the modern instrument has a more involved mechanism that allows much more chromatic agility. The ubiquity of the B-flat and A clarinets is a vestige of the clarinet’s early days, when its simpler keywork made it poorly suited to playing in more than a handful of keys early clarinetists owned several instruments of different transpositions so that they could play in whatever key was required. It seems a redundancy to have two instruments so close in range. The difference is one of an inch or so in length, giving the A clarinet a range that is deeper by one semitone. These are clarinets in the keys of B-flat and A, and, in truth, they very nearly are the same-identical in keywork and playing approach. Photo, Ollie CrafoordĪlert concertgoers will be aware that the orchestral clarinetist is often seen on stage with not one, but two clarinets, which appear to be nearly identical. Since other sizes of clarinet require their own mouthpieces and reeds, there is a clearer separation between these instruments. The reason for this, which may not be obvious to a non-clarinetist, is that the B-flat and A instruments use the same mouthpieces, reeds, and sometimes even barrels. The professor, not a wind player, raised the question of why I limited the discussion to clarinets in B-flat and A, and ignored, for example, the C clarinet. I wrote this a few years back for a graduate school course.
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