Family Characteristics: Clarinets where breathing is concerned, not indeed because more breath is needed, but, on the contrary, because so terribly little is released at a time through the tiny aperture between the reeds, thus requiring tremendous stamina and control. Long solos as at the beginning of Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin are as much tests of endurance as they are technical challenges. Some of the greatest virtuosi such as Leon Goossens and Heinz Holliger solve this by acquiring a curious skill whereby the cheek is used as a kind of bagpipe sack which can continue to supply air during an extended solo while the player relieves the pressure on his lungs. This is, however, a highly specialized accomplishment and by no means standard practice. Whereas the character and problems of the subsidiary oboes largely resemble those of the oboe itself, there is certainly a marked variation in the degree of stridency, the oboe d’amore and bass oboe in Particular being considerably gentler and mellower. This is to some extent true also of the cor anglais, as Wagner discovered to his cost when he wanted his melancholy piper in the Third Act of Tristan to play a jubilant fanfare when Isolde’s ship is at last sighted. It was of course of the utmost importance that it should be clearly heard and in this emergency he inserted a long footnote into the score describing his attempts to invent a new instrument for the purpose. This has, however, failed to reach the universal acceptance of his other inven- tions (the bass trumpet and the ‘Wagner tubas’, q.v.) and on such occasions when the cor anglais itself has not been used, the Hungarian hybrid tarogato (a kind of conical wooden clarinet) has been pressed into service, or occasionally —worst of all—a trumpet. CLARINETS Although far less angular in tone than the oboe, the clarinet can achieve a far greater degree of sheer volume, especially in the upper register where its {ff becomes incredibly shrill and piercing. At the same time its ppp has the potential of achieving a sound at the very edge of audibility, and it can therefore boast the widest contrast of volume in the woodwind section. The extremely soft effect is often known as ‘ghosting’, although it is not so designated in orchestral scores but rather as ‘Echo-tone’. Mahler calls for this in an exquisite passage in the first movement of his Second Symphony: 173The Woodwind Ex. 167 Echoton bar be bt. be kta Oe SPP ae AP sempre FP Fate le, ie |b sempre FP Clarinets can also match the flutes in agility, though this is markedly less true of the larger varieties. The solo in the last movement of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony springs readily to mind: Ow. in 2 AP Ex. 168 iar. Soto = = = A ag 3 SF we te aS ee 7 and Stravinsky allocated a spendidly virtuoso arpeggiando obbligato to two clarinets in Jocasta’s aria ‘Ne probentur oracula’ from Oedipus Rex. Tippett also very cleverly exploited the slinky liquid flexibility of clarinets in the second of his Ritual Dances from The Midsummer Marriage, ‘The Otter chases the Fish’, the darting movements of the fish illustrated thus: Ex. 169 ees @ ceria) The bottom register of the clarinet has a character all its own which is even graced by a special term ‘chalumeau’, actually the name of 174Family Characteristics: Clarinets an old forerunner of the family, now long deceased. The chalumeau register is not only particularly beautiful in quality but is also the easiest to control in the handling of very soft effects. This is so much beloved of composers that they often write long passages for two diarinets playing in unison at this register as at the opening of Dvofak’s Cello Concerto or the entire slow introduction to Tchai- kovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The strident upper octave has the opposite characteristic, being hard to control with reliable intonation and dynamics; the flutes and oboes, sitting immediately in front, find the upper notes of their clarinet colleagues, especially those of the Eb, a hazard in the pursuit of perfect blénd of tone and pitch. Another problem indigenous to clarinets is the phenomenon of the ‘break’ half-way up their compass—i.e. between = and fe (written notes), where the tone tends to be weak and watery as well as sharp in pitch. It is also hard to alternate notes rapidly on either side of the break. From this point of view the unknown bowdlerizer of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto committed a gaffe when, with the disap- pearance of the instrument with extended range, he changed Mozart’s now impossible: Ex. 170 which was both easy and effective, to the gawky and ill-sounding: Ex. 171 2 Eee q - Lying across the break as it does, this latter example is often held to be impossible though it is in fact not so in the hands of expert virtuosi. The subsidiary clarinets, in keeping with the wide contrast shown by the extremes of register of the clarinet as such, also exhibit an enviable variety of characteristics. The bass clarinet can be melan- choly or even sinister, as in its atmospheric evocation of witches (Dvo¥ak’s The Noonday Witch and Liadov’s Kikimora are obvious examples) while at the other extreme the Eb clarinet has also been 175The Woodwind used to depict a witch, but in no such spine-chilling way; rather, splendidly grotesque: Ex. 172 Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique Allegro. id.es001 be Slur La Ba Ws Cur 0G. Negro. (dee Mahler regularly used the Eb clarinet to suggest parody, for which its cheeky tone (keck—one of the composer’s favourite instructions) makes it eminently suitable; while Strauss’s selection of the D clarinet, which in all essentials has much the same character as that of the ED, to impersonate the jocular Till Eulenspiegel, has already been singled out (p. 162) as the outstanding example of exploitation of these little clarinets’ particular quality. They have equal potential as humorists and as caricaturists, though the clowns of the orchestra par excellence will probably always remain, much to the fury of their executants, . . . BASSOONS Though admittedly no more than one facet—and by no means necessarily the more important—of the bassoons’ exceptionally con- trasted two-fold character, it has to be acknowledged that the inherent humour of the instrument’s very tone-quality makes it the obvious choice for comic effects. There is always a hilarious atmosphere of farce or parody in a bevy of bassoons playing fortissimo, that no other instrument can rival: 176