The Early Clarinet: A Practical Guide (review)

The Early Clarinet: A Practical Guide. By Colin Lawson. (Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xiii, 128 p. ISBN 0-521-62459-2 (cloth); 0-521-62466-5 (pbk.). $49.95 (cloth); $17.95 (pbk.).]

The Early Clarinet: A Practical Guide is the second book in a new series, Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music. (The inaugural volume of the series, Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell's The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction, was published last year. [See the review in this issue, pp. 588-91.--Ed.]) This short but informative book aims to present the current state of research on the early clarinet, with "early" defined by the author as ca. 1700-1900. Lawson guides clarinetists in the use of historical evidence as a means to inform their interpretations on either modern or period instruments. He treats a variety of subjects, including the role of the clarinet in the historical performance movement, the organological development of the instrument, and the interpretation of historical treatises.

Lawson is one of the world's leading performers on the early clarinet, and it therefore comes as a surprise that chapter 4, entitled "Playing Historical Clarinets," is written not by him but by Ingrid Pearson, with no explanation given as to why this important chapter was delegated to another author. (Lawson had already ventured into print with a book chapter entitled "Playing Historical Clarinets" in his Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995].) In fact, this chapter is only indirectly about how to play historical clarinets today; instead, it provides an overview of clarinet treatises from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specific performance suggestions come in chapter 6, "Case Studies in Ensemble Music," which examines five works (by Handel, Stamitz, Mozart, Weber, and Brahms) and discusses how a clarinetist could approach these from a historical perspective, touching on a range of issues, such as choice of instruments, comparison of editions, style of articulation, tempo flexibility, phrasing decisions, and even size of hall. This stimulating chapter offers provocative observations for performance on both modern and period clarinets.

Lawson adopts what might be referred to as a "purist" approach to period-instrument performance, arguing for the closest possible historical and geographical match of instrument to musical work. For example, he states that "an early nineteenth-century clarinet will probably not be idiomatic for Mozart's music" (p. 25). Elsewhere, one senses that he is chiding some of his colleagues when he writes that "some fine players of Boehm-system clarinets are content to overload their early clarinets with mechanism and to pay scant attention to considerations of style . . . an approach which . . . is bound to be limited in its aspirations and achievements" (pp. xii-xiii). Although there is logic to his approach, Lawson overstates the degree to which composers of the past intended their compositions to be performed on the latest models of locally produced clarinets. Players then, as now, traveled, played on imported instruments, or continued to play on "outdated" models. (The La Scala virtuoso Ernesto Cavallini played on his six-key clarinet until the 1870s.)

Lawson repeatedly emphasizes the value of studying early-twentieth-century recordings for evidence pointing to the spontaneity of late-nineteenth-century (and possibly even eighteenth-century) performance practice. It is unfortunate that he did not elaborate on this point with an analysis of actual early recordings--many of which are now available in reissues--rather than merely referring the reader to Robert Philip's Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance, 1900-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

It is a sure sign that the historical performance movement has become part of mainstream musical life when its leading practitioners move from studying treatises to writing their own, for The Early Clarinet is nothing less than a modern treatise on how to play the early clarinet today. This valuable book (along with forthcoming volumes in the same series for the early horn...