Instrument of the Week! Bass Clarinet!

The Bass Clarinet is an instrument in the clarinet family that plays in the lower range. To a layman it looks kind of like an anorexic Saxophone, however this instrument is fundamentally different. The bore of the Saxophone starts small and gradually increases. The bass clarinet has a fairly consistent bore size throughout until you reach the bell which is turned up and has a larger size than the bore. All Clarinets are members of the woodwind family. Most are made from wood though fully metal bass clarinets do exist. The keys, bell, and other connecting parts are metal in most cases. The Bass Clarinet is an orchestral and concert instrument. It is heavily used in Jazz. The instrument is also popular in film scores. The instrument is what is called a transposing instrument, which means that the music is written in a different pitch than it sounds. For the Bass Clarinet this usually means what is musically written as C sounds like B flat. Most Bass Clarinet’s are B flat instruments many professional instruments have a low C extension, or sometimes and even lower extension. The Bass Clarinet is heavy and has a peg stand and neck strap to take the weight off of the player. A Bass Clarinet player is usually called a Bass Clarinetist. The instrument has many arguments for who and when it was invented. One might comfortably say it was an evolution of different instruments, between 1750 AD and 1838 AD, resulting in its final appearance. The Bass clarinet is well known amongst musicians and spreading in notoriety amongst the public. It was used in the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-four.” Famous Bass Clarinetist include Eric Dolphy, Rudi Mahall, John Coltrane , The Edmund Welles quartet, and the duet Sqwonk.

Resources:

• Bass Clarinet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_clarinet) The Wikipedia page! Yeah yeah, I know…but hay its distilled knowledge. If it still bothers you just look at the resources they site.
• International Bass Clarinet Research Center (http://www.circb.info/) A group of academics studying the history and repertoire of the bass clarinet.
• The Clarinets Base Clarinet Page (http://www.the-clarinets.net/english/bass-clarinet.html) A great web site for all things Clarinet. This particular page is their bass clarinet page.