"Richard Robinson" wrote in message
o.uk...
So, since we seem to have focussed on bridges, are you saying Swarbrick
used
a different bridge to orchestral players ? (Come to that, do orchestral
players differ on the issue ?)

Yes. It was he who brought to my attention that the
fiddle bridge is lower. On the orchestral violin the
higher bridge helps prevent the player accidentally
bowing a second string in fast passages, whereas
in fiddle playing double stopping is used frequently.


I have always tried to be as accurate as I can in music.
Why say trumpet if you really mean flugel horn :-)

What I want to know is why everybody who isn't sure asks me if that
thing's
an oboe ? Way, way more common than "is it a clarinet ?".

And yet the clarinet is far more often seen than the oboe.
Odd.

When I become involved in music recording professionally,
I suddenly found myself among people who could differentiate
in a second between a Bosendorefer, Bechstein, Steinway,
Yamaha or Baldwin grand. Many had perfect pitch. As
students we used to try to set an oscillator to A=442 with
eyes closed. Most of us were pretty good at that!

In aural perception were asked to listen to an alto saxophone
playing in low register, and tenor saxophone in high register
and say which was which. When I mentioned this to my tutor
he said "They do sound different. But one simple clue is
that if one sounds sharp, it is probably the tenor (top end) or if
one sounds flat (low end) it is almost ceretainly the alto". Later
investigation of the instrument's design clarified things enormously.

I specialised later in baroque and early music recording for
L'Oiseau Lyre (also a Decca subsiduary) The sound of
the early instruments is totally different to their modern
counterparts. I was particularly interested in the
chalumeau, which the predecessor of your clarinet.

Sometimes there were no other recordings to use as any kind of a
reference, so we were encouraged to study the score and parts,
often not even printed but photocopies of originals. Many
interesting things revealed themselves:

Today we commonly use only two clefs, the G and F clef.
Baroque composers used several, among them a C Soprano
clef (drawn like a tenor block clef) which centred on the
first line (which is E on our treble clef) So, for the key
of D, the two sharps were F# on the second space
(treble clef A) and fourth space (treble clef E)
Wonderful!

Iain