Colin Lawson

The development of the clarinet

Introduction The clarinet may be defined as a woodwind instrument with a predominantly cylindrical bore and a single reed that overblows at the twelfth. The term ‘woodwind’ does not preclude the instrument being made of a material other than wood; indeed, at least one of the few surviving very early clarinets is made of ivory. As regards overblowing at the twelfth, the assumption that one can use identical fingering in the chalumeau and clarinet registers has rather less validity on earlier clarinets than modern ones. With these reservations, the clarinet can be traced back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it is generally believed to have been invented by Johann Christoph Denner in Nuremberg, as outlined in Chapter 1. Instruction tutors for the clarinet go back more than 200 years, and almost from the beginning the tutor has normally opened with a brief history of the instrument. Originally this was not regarded as having much importance, nor are these brief histories very reliable. My presumption in this chapter is that it will be read by people interested in how the clarinet they know today evolved, or in playing or listening to earlier clarinets, and I will bypass aspects of the history of the instrument that seem to me less interesting from this point of view. This is a major restriction, because many of the fascinating and ingenious inventions that have been applied to the clarinet seem to have had no significant effect either at the time, or subsequently.

Political process, social structure and musical performance in Europe since 1450

I will examine the history of musical performance by, in political terms, seeing how a cultural community is shaped by differing groups and forces. Performing involves interaction among people involved in organising, paying, listening and interpreting. Their relationships may vary at any time from close collaboration to intense conflict. Different kinds of communities interact in this political process, variously the performing institution, a court or a city, and the state or a region of states. Negotiation must go on among participants, according to organisational rules, musical practices and financial constraints. Tradition and change compete with each other under pressure from social movements and individual opportunism. While these factors are usually just taken for granted, crises often make them articulated in print. An efficient way to enquire into these social and political processes is to examine dualities which have recurred in Western musical life since the late Middle Ages. Involving collaboration and conflict to varying extents, the dualities within performing relationships can help us go beyond the banal phrase ‘Music and Society’ by identifying the dynamics aspects of musical culture. The first section of this chapter briefly examines musical dualities under three headings – Location, Production and Taste. The second section discusses how the dualities generally played out during four periods of music history since around 1450. Scholars typically agree that a public musical world emerged by around 1450 in Western and Central Europe, and we can see lines of continuity from that time to the present. It is indeed enlightening to see how the origins of modern practices can reach back so far.

The performer and the composer

His execution is not polished – that is, his playing is not unblemished . . . his improvising gave me much pleasure . . . sometimes he does astonishing things. Besides, he ought not be thought of as a pianist, because he is dedicated totally to composition and it is very hard to be at once a composer and a performer. This remarkable observation would have astonished earlier generations of musicians. In all likelihood it would have astonished Beethoven and most of his contemporaries as well. The idea that a composer could not be equally skilled as a performer was at the beginning of the nineteenth century revolutionary. Pleyels comment, however, is representative of a shift of perspective in many aesthetic considerations during this period. It signals the beginnings of a century-long transition towards a separation of the roles of composers and performers, when the very nature of their relationship changed at a rate unprecedented in history. This chapter will address this relationship by examining the perceived self-identity of composers and performers, the leadership of ensembles and the changing views regarding so-called ‘fidelity to the score’. It will also survey relevant performance issues which inform this relationship, such as improvisation, tempo and rubato, focusing on increased notational specificity introduced during the nineteenth century. Communication and collaboration The composer–performer relationship, at once both intimate and remote, is certainly among the most remarkable phenomena in Western music. Co-creators, like actor and playwright, choreographer and dancer, composer and performer have long collaborated fruitfully, but at the same time the relationship has been fraught with tension and potential misunderstandings.

The Ancient World

The notion of ‘performance’ was central to the practice and ideology of ancient Greek and Roman societies: a politicians speech or a lawyers closing, a choral exhibition or a sport competition were all interactive events whose fundamental components were the spectacle and its audience, both of which had an active role in the way they functioned. This was particularly true for musical activities, whose civic and educational value was outstanding, especially in Classical Greece. Indeed, the ancient Greek culture of mousikē embraced the entire field of poetic performance to which the Muses gave their name, including song, poetry and bodily movement, all integrated within an event, which served to define culture, ethnicity and gender, and was a core element of religious and social rituals. The settings for such artistic performances ranged from entertainment in the private home to larger urban or pan-Hellenic festivals (i.e. ‘involving all Greeks’, not just a single polis ), where competitive events took place in public. In these contexts the entire community, whether limited to a specific social elite or extended to the whole Hellenic society, was involved and found a common identity. These performances were thus not only a valuable means of reinforcing local individualities, but also a dynamic opportunity for exchange and interaction among different parts of the Greek world. It was through these occasions that regional identities consolidated their ‘Hellenic’ sense of affiliation.

Performance in the seventeenth century: an overview

Music of the Baroque era has occupied a special place in the drive towards ‘authentic’, ‘period’ or (so current parlance prefers) ‘historically informed’ performance. HIP is, of course, hip, and has been for a long while; it is also a source of some anxiety, and not just from a more conservative cast of performers anxious to preserve their own hard-earned traditions. While HIP might in principle extend across all repertoires, its central tenets are usually deemed less relevant to music somehow closer to our own time. Therefore, if perhaps the greatest composer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), was the ‘creator of modern music’, so Leo Schrade famously styled him in 1950, then his operas, sacred music and madrigals might not need the benefit – or the crutch – of HIP to convey their messages. Likewise, if Bach and Handel mark the start of the so-called ‘common practice’ period deemed essential to the music-theoretical training of any musician, then their music presumably speaks to all times independent of how authentic its performance. Nor is this ‘presentist’ (universalist, transcendentalist) stance annulled by the ‘historicist’ arguments often adduced in favour of HIP: that period performance brings the music somehow back to what the composer intended (which succumbs to the intentional fallacy), or to how it might have been heard in its time (but we are not authentic listeners). Further, advocates of HIP can easily be accused of opportunism (for commercial gain), escapism (from the dreaded musical avant-garde) or even just the exotic Ye-Olde-Tea-Shoppe fakery of the heritage industry. But although postmodernism has thrown a spanner in the works – so my previous remarks suggest – the battle for HIP has been fought and rightly won in many musical environments. Moreover, few can deny that its best exponents have the virtue of making old music sound fresh, vital and even new. While this might seem a convenient paradox, it is a laudable enough aim for any repertoire.

Music and musical performance: histories in disjunction?

If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light . . . Few things would mortify me more, than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth. The Earl of Chesterfields precept signals the disjuncture between the concepts of music and musical performance as perceived by a British aristocrat in the mid-eighteenth century: listening to music is something a nobleman might do and enjoy without compromise to his station in life, but to participate in its performance is to invite social stigma. And Adam Smith could observe that to work as a professional performer was a ‘sort of public prostitution’, and the ‘exorbitant rewards’ paid to the most admired players and opera singers both reflected the rarity and beauty of their talents, and compensated them for the social ‘discredit of employing them in this manner’. But Smiths prediction that any lessening in societys prejudice against performers would lead to a corresponding diminution of their earning potential was to prove very wide of the mark; it stands now as an indication of just how much the routine disparagement of performers and an accompanying ambivalence towards musics cultural standing was to change. For not only was nineteenth-century Britain to prove one of the most lucrative earning grounds for superstar performers, but as a nation it also became serious about encouraging and training its own native performing talent, so as to be the better able to satisfy its appetite for music of all kinds.

Instrumental performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’

Arcangelo Corelli dated the dedication to his Opus 5 violin sonatas 1 January 1700, suggesting an awareness that the new century might usher in a change of outlook. By 1710, these sonatas had appeared in numerous editions across Europe and were being imitated by a multitude of composers in Italy, France, England and Germany. In a sense, they establish an agenda for the genre. The Calcinotto engraving of Giuseppe Tartini (dating, it seems, from the early 1760s) has a border with violin, bow and open music clearly marked ‘Corelli’ (plus, interestingly, volumes with ‘Zarlino’ and ‘Plato’ on their spines). In the last decade of the eighteenth century at least fifteen editions of Corellis Op. 5 were published in Italy, Spain, France and England. Muzio Clementi produced an edition in 1800 while J.-B. Cartier brought out what he described as the ‘15 th edition’ with a preface suggesting continuity between the school that Corelli established and ‘the famous artists of our times’. The sonatas of Opus 5 were to provide formative study material for generations of violinists. A case could thus be made for treating the (actual) eighteenth century (1 January 1700 to 31 December 1799) as a coherent style period. These sonatas were, however, mid-career productions for a composer whose Op. 1 appeared in 1681. The ‘long eighteenth century’ is a useful category precisely because it accommodates changes initiated more or less anywhere in the last few decades of the seventeenth century and replaced somewhere in the early nineteenth century. Corelli as a dominant influence on violinists fits well into such a period view. From the point of view of instrumental performance there are other equally useful bookends. (The bookend metaphor seems apt, given the essential adjustability of these very practical devices.)