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The clarinet: who has helped make it special?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Benny Goodman

Few would deny that the clarinet is the most versatile of the woodwind family, particularly its ability to go from very quiet to very loud. For this reason its repertoire stretches from Mozart (among the first to use the clarinet in an orchestra) in the 18th century to jazz musician Benny Goodman in the 20th century.

Open QuoteI can make up the sound like that, but I can’t be a jazz clarinet-playerClose Quote

Joy Farrall

Originally, a clarinet-player would perform all the music written for the instrument. Nowadays, there is so much music that there is at least one distinction between who plays what; there are Western classical clarinet-players and jazz clarinet-players.

Sometimes the two overlap, as Benny Goodman did famously when he asked the Hungarian composer Bela Bartók to write a piece for him. Bartók composed Contrasts, and here’s a bit of the composer, Benny Goodman and violinist Josef Szigeti in New York on 13 May 1940.

Joy Farrall classes herself as a Western classical clarinet-player. She explains why and how she is different from a jazz musician.

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Different makes and pitches

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