Scientific American Supplement No. 819, September 12, 1891

by Various

Before leaving the double reed wind instruments, a few words should be said of a family of instruments in the sixteenth century as important as the schalmeys, pommers, and bombards, but long since extinct. This was the cromorne, a wooden instrument with cylindrical column of air; the name is considered to remain in the cremona stop of the organ. The lower end is turned up like a shepherd's crook reversed, from whence the French name "tournebout." Cromorne is the German "krummhorn;" there is no English equivalent known.

The tone, as in all the reed instruments of the period, was strong and often bleating. The double reed was inclosed in a pirouette, or cup, and the keys of the tenor or bass, just the same as with similar flutes and bombards, were hidden by a barrel-shaped cover, pierced with small openings, apparently intended to modify the too searching tone as well as to protect the touch pieces which moved the keys. The compass was limited to fundamental notes, and from the cylindrical tube and reed was an octave lower in pitch than the length would show. In all these instruments provision was made in the holes and keys for transposition of the hands according to the player's habit of placing the right or left hand above the other. The unused hole was stopped with wax. There is a fine and complete set of four cromornes in the museum of the Conservatoire at Brussels.

We must also place among double-reed instruments the various bagpipes, cornemuses, and musettes, which are shawm or oboe instruments with reservoirs of air, and furnished with drones inclosing single reeds. I shall have more to say about the drone in the third lecture. In restricting our attention to the Highland bagpipe, with which we are more or less familiar, it is surprising to find the peculiar scale of the chaunter, or finger pipe, in an old Arabic scale, still prevailing in Syria and Egypt. Dr. A.J. Ellis' lecture on "The Musical Scales of Various Nations," read before the Society of Arts, and printed in the Journal of the Society, March 27, 1885, No. 1688, vol. xxxiii., and in an appendix, October 30, 1885, in the same volume, should be consulted by any one who wishes to know more about this curious similarity.

We have now arrived at the clarinet. Although embodying a very ancient principle—the "squeaker" reed which our little children still make, and continued in the Egyptian arghool—the clarinet is the most recent member of the wood wind band. The reed initiating the tone by the player's breath is a broad, single, striking or beating reed, so called because the vibrating tongue touches the edges of the body of the cutting or framing. A cylindrical pipe, as that of the clarinet, drops, approximately, an octave in pitch when the column of air it contains is set up in vibration by such a reed, because the reed virtually closes the pipe at the end where it is inserted, and like a stopped organ pipe sets up a node of maximum condensation or rarefaction at that end. This peculiarity interferes with the resonance of the even-numbered partials of the harmonic scale, and permits only the odd-numbered partials, 1, 3, 5, and so on, to sound. The first harmonic, as we find in the clarinet, is therefore the third partial, or twelfth of the fundamental note, and not the octave, as in the oboe and flute.

In the oboe the shifting of the nodes in a conical tube open at its base, and narrowing to its apex, permits the resonance of the complete series of the harmonic scale, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and upward. The flute has likewise the complete series, because through the blowhole it is a pipe open at both ends. But while stating the law which governs the pitch and harmonic scale of the clarinet, affirmed equally by observation and demonstration, we are left at present with only the former when regarding two very slender, almost cylindrical reed pipes, discovered in 1889 by Mr. Flinders Petrie while excavating at Fayoum the tomb of an Egyptian lady named Maket. Mr. Petrie dates these pipes about 1100 B.C., and they were the principal subject of Mr. Southgate's recent lectures upon the Egyptian scale.

Now Mr. J. Finn, who made these ancient pipes sound at these lectures with an arghool reed of straw, was able upon the pipe which had, by finger holes, a tetrachord, to repeat that tetrachord a fifth higher by increased pressure of blowing, and thus form an octave scale, comprising eight notes. "Against the laws of nature," says a friend of mine, for the pipe having dropped more than an octave through the reed, was at its fundamental pitch, and should have overblown a twelfth.

But Mr. Finn allows me to say with reference to those reeds, perhaps the oldest sounding musical instruments known to exist, that his experiments with straw reeds seem to indicate low, medium, and high octave registers. The first and last difficult to obtain with reeds as made by us. He seeks the fundamental tones of the Maket pipes in the first or low register, an octave below the normal pitch. By this the fifths revert to twelfths. I offer no opinion, but will leave this curious phenomenon to the consideration of my friends, Mr. Blaikley, Mr. Victor Mahillon, and Mr. Hermann Smith, acousticians intimate with wind instruments.

The clarinet was invented about A.D. 1700, by Christopher Denner, of Nuremberg. By his invention, an older and smaller instrument, the chalumeau, of eleven notes, without producible harmonics, was, by an artifice of raising a key to give access to the air column at a certain point, endowed with a harmonic series of eleven notes a twelfth higher. The chalumeau being a cylindrical pipe, the upper partials could only be in an odd series, and when Denner made them speak, they were consequently not an octave, but a twelfth above the fundamental notes. Thus, an instrument which ranged, with the help of eight finger holes and two keys, from F in the bass clef to B flat in the treble had an addition given to it at once of a second register from C in the treble clef to E flat above it. The scale of the original instrument is still called chalumeau by the clarinet player; about the middle of the last century it was extended down to E. The second register of notes, which by this lengthening of pipe started from B natural, received the name of clarinet, or clarionet, from the clarino or clarion, the high solo trumpet of the time it was expected that this bright harmonic series would replace.

This name of clarinet, or clarionet, became accepted for the entire instrument, including the chalumeau register. It is the communication between the external air and the upper part of the air column in the instrument which, initiating a ventral segment or loop of vibration, forces the air column to divide for the next possible partial, the twelfth, that Denner has the merit of having made practicable. At the same time the manipulation of it presents a difficulty in learning the instrument. It is in the nature of things that there should be a difference of tone quality between the lower and upper registers thus obtained; and that the highest fundamental notes, G sharp, A and B flat, should be colorless compared with the first notes of the overblown series. This is a difficulty the player has to contend with, as well as the complexity of fingering, due to there being no less than eighteen sound holes. Much has been done to graft Boehm's system of fingering upon the clarinet, but the thirteen key system, invented early in this century by Iwan Muller, is still most employed. The increased complication of mechanism is against a change, and there is even a stronger reason, which I cannot do better than translate, in the appropriate words of M. Lavoix fils, the author of a well-known and admirable work upon instrumentation:

"Many things have still to be done, but inventors must not lose the point in view, that no tone quality is more necessary to the composer than that of the clarinet in its full extent; that it is very necessary especially to avoid melting together the two registers of chalumeau and clarinet, so distinct from each other. If absolute justness for these instruments is to be acquired at the price of those inestimable qualities, it would be better a hundred times to leave it to virtuosi, thanks to their ability, to palliate the defects of their instrument, rather than sacrifice one of the most beautiful and intensely colored voices of our orchestra."