(clarinet playing quickly)
The clarinet is basically just a cylindrical wooden tube
with finger holes, so that as I take more fingers
off the instrument, the pitch will rise.
(plays ascending scale)
Like that.
And a lot of metal keys in order to enable me
to play all the notes in between those notes.
The chromatic notes.
(plays ascending chromatic scale)
And some of that metal work is to enable us
to play trills, for example, quite rapidly and efficiently.
(plays trill)
Now, if I didn't have the key on the side of the instrument,
that trill would come out like this,
(plays two-note trill slower and less cleanly)
which might not particularly please
either the conductor or the composer.
So, a lot of this metal stuff,
although it looks complicated,
is actually there to simplify matters for us.
In order that we don't have to carry a case around
which is as long as this instrument,
particularly as we usually have to carry two,
the instrument takes apart
and you can see there is the bell,
which is the end of the clarinet, called a bell
because it's bell shaped, obviously.
You then have the main part of the clarinet
in a lower joint and an upper joint,
and then at the very top, we have a barrel
and the mouthpiece and reed on the mouthpiece,
which go on the top of the barrel.
Well, if you go to an orchestral concert,
you may have sometimes wondered why you see
the clarinetists with two clarinets,
whereas all the other members of the woodwind section
have just the one.
And you'll sometimes see us change quite rapidly
from one to the other.
Now, this isn't because one of the instruments
has suddenly become worn out,
or indeed that we're trying out different instruments
in the concert.
It's just that because of the nature of the
fingering system on the clarinet,
most composers write for two different clarinets
in order to avoid us playing in complicated keys.
So, we have a Bb clarinet, which is the shorter one,
and an A clarinet, which is the longer one.
I'll just put a mouthpiece on
so that you can hear the difference in pitch.
So, if I finger the note C on my Bb clarinet,
(plays a Bb)
it comes out as a Bb.
And if I finger the same note, C, on my A clarinet,
it comes out as an A.
(plays an A)
So, we have to be careful
to get the right instrument to do that.
Sometimes, composers ask for a very, very
rapid change from one to the other.
For example, Bartok in his trio "Contrasts",
which we've recently recorded as part
of the Philharmonia's Bartok series,
Bartok asks for a change that's this fast.
(plays ascending scale)
(plays quick pattern)
As you can see, I slightly fumbled that change,
and if that was a concert, I would definitely
have missed it.
So, you have to be pretty nifty
with some of these changes.
That also brings up issues with the conductor,
because, obviously, if we're concentrated
on a complicated change of clarinets,
we can't watch the conductor during that time.
Obviously we've got bars rest, but,
those bars rest might be quite complex
if it's Stravinsky, or the bars might
be in a different time from one another.
So, we'll quite often ask the conductor
after we've had a change,
"Excuse me, could you be sure
"to give us a clear cue at the end of that?"
Sometimes, in a concert, you may see clarinetists
adjust their instrument at the barrel
by slightly pulling out or pushing in
to adjust the length of the instrument.
This is because we may have noticed
that either one or two of our colleagues
or possibly ourselves, or somewhere else
in the orchestra something has slightly
changed in pitch, and we need to microscopically
change the pitch of the instrument
in order to adjust that so that the sound
reaches the audience bang in tune.
Now, the reed, which is a quite simple piece of wood,
you see, at one end, it's a piece of cane
which has been cut so it tapers to a very, very thin tip.
So thin I can even put it on my thumbnail
and it will show flexibility.
So the very end of the reed is very flexible.
It means that when I put the reed against
the mouthpiece, there's a small gap
to blow air down, but small enough that when that air
goes through the instrument,
the tip of the reed will vibrate, and that's
what makes the sound.
(plays low note)
Now, it's very important to get the right sound
that the reed is absolutely right,
and you may sometimes, particularly if you
come to a rehearsal, see clarinetists
surrounded with what might look like hundreds of reeds
in order to find the right one.
It can be a bit of a nightmare for us,
because a different concert hall may be less resonant
than the next one, which means that a slightly different
resistance of reed is required to make just the right sound.
If I play a reed which is too unresistant for a hall,
(plays five short notes)
you can get quite a rough sound.
On the other hand, if the reed is too resistant,
(attempts to play note)
you can probably hardly get any sound through it at all.
And that can vary from venue to venue,
and playing in an orchestra where on tour
we may go from hall to hall, even country to country,
different atmospheric conditions from day to day,
one usually needs to carry a selection of reeds
in order to choose exactly the right one
to get the right sound in the hall
on that particular day.
That might sound like a terrible nightmare for us,
but, of course, if things don't go quite right,
we can change the reed.
And as flautists, horn players, and trumpeters
are constantly saying to us,
of course, if their lips don't feel right
on a certain day, they can't change them, can they?
Yeah.
The way we produce the sound, obviously,
to get a basic sound, one blows through
the instrument as warmly as possible.
(plays long, low tone)
Now, if I blow the air through the instrument
far more slowly, the sound will become softer.
(plays long, low tone softly)
And if I blow the air through the instrument
very fast, you'll get a louder sound.
(plays long, low tone loudly)
So, although on the face of it,
you might think that an instrumentalist
has to work harder to play loud than to play soft,
in fact, it's exactly the reverse,
because if you think about it, things that are
moving slowly are harder to control
than things that are moving fast.
So to play, for example, a very high note softly,
the air is moving very slowly and one
has to be very careful to control it.
(plays long, high note)
In fact, that very note has just featured
in one or two of our Beethoven concerts
at the end of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony,
3rd Movement in the Trio.
(plays arpeggiated passage)
So one has to be quite careful
to control that last note because it's so soft.
Obviously, once you get behind the instrument,
into the player him or herself, it's quite hard
for an outsider to see what is actually going on.
You can see the fingers move,
you can't see what's going on inside the person's mouth.
In order to make the reed vibrate properly,
we curl our bottom lip over the bottom teeth,
but the top teeth go on the top of the instrument.
And we then have to close the mouth so no air escapes.
(plays long, low note)
Although some contemporary composers have actually
started to ask specifically for a very breathy sound.
(plays low note breathily)
The Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel
asks for various different categories of breathy sound.
Half breathy, breathy, and so on.
So we have to actually, nowadays,
learn to be able to control
what we spent all our student years trying
to avoid completely.
Now, I've played so far just long notes.
If we want to play a series of separate notes,
(plays five short, separated notes)
And you see, I blew down the instrument
several times separately then,
but that sounds rather breathless and unmusical,
so what we do is to use the tip of the tongue
against the reed to stop the sound,
interrupt the sound, which will enable us
to keep the air going and play a number
of repeated notes more musically.
(plays five notes in one breath)
And one can, by using that method, play extremely short.
(plays short notes)
There's a passage in Beethoven's Fourth Symphony
where he asks the bassoonist and the clarinetist
to play a very, very rapid staccato.
(plays several notes staccato)
Which can be a nightmare in a concert
if it doesn't go quite right, of course not if it does.
So, that's an example of quite fast tonguing,
and there's a separate tongue stroke
for every one of those notes.
(orchestra playing Salonen's Violin Concerto)
(clarinetist playing loudly)
Obviously, in an orchestra, you'll sometimes
get all the instruments of the orchestra
playing together in what we call a "tutti" passage,
where everybody's playing at once.
Sometimes, making a very, very loud sound indeed,
but sometimes, the whole orchestra can also
play very quietly together, which can be quite exciting.
The woodwind instruments, of which the clarinet is one,
will be playing a part in that, but also the woodwind
are quite often asked to act as soloists
within the orchestra.
So we'll sometimes be playing as part
of the group, and we'll sometimes be playing,
as it were, as the lead part, or as a soloist.
For example, the opening of the Finale
of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
(plays short notes loudly)
We're playing very loud indeed,
so you would imagine that the clarinets would be heard,
but the trumpets are playing at the same time.
And in any orchestra with a decent trumpet section,
which of course the Philharmonia has,
there's no chance whatsoever of hearing the clarinets.
You'll hear trumpet sound and a general tutti sound
around it with the trumpets leading.
At the beginning of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony,
the clarinets play this:
(plays short notes loudly)
(plays slightly longer notes quieter)
Now, the first part of that, I was part
of the tutti sound, and you probably wouldn't
hear the clarinets at all.
But the second part of it is a clarinet solo.
The clarinet has the lead part.
(plays the second part of the previous melody again)
So, although Beethoven writes that
to be played very softly, piano,
I'm actually playing with quite a healthy, warm sound
in order to be heard as the lead solo part.
- [Narrator] If you've enjoyed learning
about the instruments in the orchestra,
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(orchestra playing Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique)
Follow along with synchronized scores.
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