On Jun 7, 2007, at 1:25 PM, Raymond Horton wrote:
I don't think he has an alto (has there ever been an orchestral part for an alto?
I have written several. You can hear it in my recorded _Procrustean Concerto for the Bb Clarinet_ (the alto, if this confuses you, is one of the orchestral clarinets, while the soloist is a standard Bb)
If so, why, when a basset horn is better?)
How so? For one extra note at the bass end? The two sound significantly different from each other, because the alto cl. bore is scaled up proportionally, while the bsthn. is not. That is, you play the bsthn. with the same mouthpiece you use for the Bb or A cl., because the inst's. bore is narrower than it theoretically ought to be. As a result, in its upper register the bsthn. is very hard to distinguish from the higher clarinets (indeed, I think this is an intentional feature, so the two will blend seemlessly), while the altcl. sounds quite distinct throughout its range, and for this I prefer it.
And I think the designation "contra-alto" is ridiculous, BTW. Just what exactly about altos is that clarinet "against"? The low clarinet in Eb can be a bass, or a double bass, or even a contrabass (which _has_ come to mean something) , but there is no way that "contra-alto" can mean "double alto" which is what I presume it is meant to mean.
You can't just play humpty-dumpty with the language that way. Contra-alto has become the settled name of the instrument, though I fully agree w. you that it is awkward. As for the etymology, contra- and double- are synonyms, both indicating that the instrument in question is an octave lower/double the size of an instrument without the prefix. FWIW, double- is a primarily British usage while contra- is primarily American--though usage is shifting in this regard.
The low clarinet in Eb *cannot* be a bass, and so far as I know has never been so called. Bass clarinets have only ever been manufactured in Bb, C, or A, and the addition of basset keys does not make it an Eb instrument.
Gunther Schuller, in one of his nastier moods, scolded one of our clarinet players for calling an Eb contrabass a "contrabass", saying it was a "contralto." My mom was a contralto. She didn't have the same range as that thing.
Contralto was one of the suggested names that lost out to contra-alto (4 syllables, please)--and for exactly the reason you suggest. The whole problem with the name of this instrument arises because the bass clarinet, as has often been pointed out, is actually the tenor of the family. Since "bass" had been thus pre-empted, another name had to be found for the true bass.
I might add, as long as we're on the subject, that all suggested renamings of alto this and tenor that to fit some artificial paradigm are as misguided as trying to rename the contra-alto clarinet. Languages are created by those who actually use them, and once a consensus has been reached (as it has on virtually all instrument names), any attempt to singlehandedly undo the consensus is quixotic at best, erroneous at worst.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://www.kallistimusic.com/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
