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 art iculation, tempo flexibility, phrasing decisions, and even size of hall. This stimulating chapter offers provocative ...