Odd is beautiful

Clarinets are great.  Everyone should have one.  Or two!  They are beautiful instruments with gorgeous sound and are capable of amazing versatility.  The best instruments are made of a kind of dense African black wood.  Usually Grenadilla wood from the mpingo tree, so dense it sinks in water.  It's lovely to see too: dark brown, almost black, with ribbons of chocolate colours snaking throughout.  Mid-level wooden clarinets are often stained to give a more uniform appearance, but high-end instruments are made with select pieces of wood that are many times left unstained.  It is also not uncommon to see instruments made from cocobolo or other exotic hardwoods.

Physically speaking, clarinets are cylindrical bore, closed end pipes.  A single reed is used to produce the vibrations (sound).  If you recall the brief introduction to the harmonic series  in the last post, you'll remember that all instruments feature the series in some way to produce characteristic tone.  Clarinets, due to their cylindrical bore, lack the even harmonics (the 2nd and 4th, etc.) in their series.  So, when we listen to a clarinet, we hear only a part of the full harmonic series.  Namely, the odd harmonics: the first, third, fifth, etc. 

If this is still a bit confusing to you, don't stress too much.  Simply realize that just because two instruments have similar shape and size (consider the similar-looking oboe and clarinet) it doesn't mean that they will sound similar (clarinets and oboes have very different sounds).  There is much more going on and that is what makes it so interesting.

Oh boy, an Oboe

Oboes are those skinny woodwind instruments that many people mistake for clarinets.  Oboes are different from clarinets because they have something called a double reed, where clarinets use only single reeds.  The two small pieces of reed cane are setup against each other and the player blows through them, creating the sound.

This week, I am giving a presentation in my woodwind pedagogy class on the shawm.  Shawms are the instruments that eventually turned into oboes.  They were much louder than modern oboes and had almost no keys.  Modern oboes have lots of keys.  The keys on oboes (hautbois) were added in response to composers writing more difficult music.  And, while the shift from shawm to oboe was happening, musical styles were changing.  Classical music was giving way to Romantic music. Romantic music used more chromaticism (half-steps, less adherance to a tonal center), so the instruments had to be able to play in all keys.

You can still hear shawms.  In North Africa and the Middle East, people play on an instrument called the surna (or surnay or zurna, depending on how you spell it) that is a kind of shawm.  It has a loud, piercing sound and the players use a technique called circular breathing, so the sound doesn't stop for breath.