3 - Equipment

Summary

Aspects of standardisation

Before purchasing an early clarinet, a player should ideally acquire some working knowledge of original instruments and manufacturers, since the choice of clarinet needs to be based on a combination of practical and historical considerations. National differences in manufacture are especially important. A major inventory of instrument collections world-wide is Phillip T. Young's 4900 Historical Woodwind Instruments, whilst The New Langwill Index by William Waterhouse is an indispensable reference source. Nowadays, students routinely debate at length the merits of the many Boehm-system clarinets currently on the market. Yet for all their slight structural differences these instruments are far more standardised and uniform than their counterparts in previous times.

Pitch has been unrealistically standardised in recent historical performance, with an almost exclusive focus upon a′= 415 (baroque), a′= 430 (classical) and a′= 435 or 440 (Romantic). This is no more than a convenient and over-simplied response to the evidence, even though the degree of acceptable compromise must clearly vary according to musical context. But for ensemble playing today's historical pitches have become so widely accepted that they cannot be ignored when purchasing either copies or original clarinets. Ironically, Quantz lamented the lack of a uniform pitch, which he reckoned was inconvenient to his work as a flautist and detrimental to music in general; he expressed the hope that a universal standard would soon find favour.