1 - The early clarinet in context

Summary

Introduction

Many clarinettists today are familiar with various dierent types of historical clarinet which have been consistently illustrated in books and journals. Nowadays these instruments are regularly being played throughout the world, giving a quite new perspective to the art of clarinet performance. The various designs of early clarinet will not be reproduced here, since a representative selection is already accessible within the pages of The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

During the course of little more than a generation, period performance has indeed become part of mainstream musical life and is pursued with skill and dedication by an ever-increasing circle of performers. Opportunities now exist to commission copies of various types of early clarinets and to perform a wide range of repertory using instruments which would have been familiar to the composers themselves. Given sufficient dedication, any experienced and open-minded modern player can achieve technical command over a wide range of clarinets. An encouragement to initiative here is Joseph Fröhlich's observation from 1810: ‘Owing to the different construction and various manners of blowing wind and reed instruments, there are no generally applicable rules of fingering. All one can do is give the usual fingerings and a critique on each note, and, at the same time, to inform the student of the various manners in which the same note can be fingered, in order to make the dark notes brighter and more sonorous, and to improve the bad ones.