The Clarinet… In The Twentieth Century

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… music for the clarinet. Now in the Woodwinds episode a couple of months back I played you some clarinet music from the 18^th and 19^th centuries and I played a bit from the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in the last episode  so I thought for today I’d concentrate on music for the clarinet from the last hundred or so years.

If you have a small voice inside saying this is going to be a little more ‘modern’ and a little less enjoyable… then I hope you’ll trust me to prove that voice wrong…. Or more particularly that you’ll trust Clause Debussy, Malcolm Arnold, Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky and Osvaldo Golijov.

Claude Debussy wrote what he called his ‘First Rhapsody’ in 1909 at the request of the Paris Conservatory to which he had just been appointed a Director. They wanted a piece for the next year’s clarinet examinations. That version was for clarinet and piano but a year later he created a version for clarinet and orchestra. I’m not sure that many pieces which started life something for an examination ended up becoming something as beautiful as this. Here is the clarinettist Franklin Cohen with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez. It is about 8 minutes long. Claude Debussy’s ‘First Rhapsody’.

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That was the clarinettist Franklin Cohen with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez performing Claude Debussy’s ‘First Rhapsody’.

If, like me, you kind of take the clarinet for granted you might be curious as to what makes its distinctive sound. The first thing is that it is a reed instrument and the reed is one of the critical things that makes a clarinet into a clarinet. So what is a reed? A reed is a small, thin timber-like piece cut from a tall perennial cane grass… a bit like bamboo… and then carefully shaped, with one end tapered to a fine edge. This single reed is attached to the mouthpiece of a clarinet with a fastening, with the thicker base secured and the thinner tip free to vibrate. When moistened by the player's breath, the reed becomes slightly more flexible, allowing it to respond to the player's air flow by rapidly vibrating against the mouthpiece. The quality of the reed—its thickness, density, and precise shape—significantly affects the instrument's tone, responsiveness, and playability, which is why clarinettists spend considerable time selecting and adjusting their reeds to achieve their desired sound. So back to the overall description of why a clarinet sounds like a clarinet. Three main things are working together: its single reed vibrating against the mouthpiece, its straight cylindrical tube shape, and the unique pattern of overtones it produces. What you might ask is an ‘overtone’? When any instrument plays a note, it creates not just the main pitch but also additional tones called overtones or harmonics. You are hearing them but we are all used to the idea that we are hearing an individual note. So, the clarinet's design causes it to emphasize only certain overtones while suppressing others. This specific mixture of overtones gives the clarinet its distinctive hollow, woody tone in low notes, its throat-like middle register, and its bright, clear high notes. It's why the clarinet can sound almost like three different instruments across its range.

Some more music. If you had asked me a couple of weeks ago to name a piece by the British 20^th century composer Malcolm Arnold… I would have struggled. Maybe I would have plucked the fact that he composed the score for David Lean’s film ‘Bridge Over The River Kwai’ from out of the ether. But probably not. Thanks though to my friend Anne Frankenburg I became aware of, and am going to play you, his Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano from 1951. There’s not that much about the piece that is easy to access on the web but my AI assistant Claude took about a second to come up with this… 

The Sonatina captures Arnold’s characteristic wit and melodic gift in a concise, three-movement work that balances British charm with jazz influences. The opening presents bright, catchy themes alongside unexpected harmonic shifts, while the central section offers a lyrical, somewhat melancholic contrast that showcases the clarinet's expressive capabilities. The finale brings a spirited, dance-like conclusion with syncopated rhythms and playful interplay between the instruments, demonstrating Arnold's ability to create music that is both technically satisfying for performers and immediately appealing to audiences.

It is about 8 minutes long and is performed here by Michael Collins on clarinet and Michael McHale on piano.

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That was Michael Collins on clarinet and Michael McHale on piano with Malcolm Arnold’s ‘Sonatina’.

Next up is something I only heard for the first time a few months ago. And I have to thank my good friend Mr Seth Reiser, a one-time clarinettist, who inspired this whole clarinet-focused episode which then led me to this fantastic piece of music. It is Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto which was commissioned in 1947 by jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman, who was eager to expand the classical repertoire for his instrument and had previously commissioned works from Bela Bartók and Paul Hindemith. The concerto is written in two quite distinct parts with a cadenza between them; a cadenza being an ornamental, virtuosic passage played by the soloist on their own. The first section features long-breathed, singing melodies that showcase the clarinet's lyrical capabilities, supported by transparent orchestral textures… and Copland himself noted at the time that his exuberant second section is… "an unconscious fusion of elements obviously related to North and South American popular music (for example, a phrase from a currently popular Brazilian tune, heard by me in Rio, became embedded in the secondary material)."

So here is Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. In this performance Stanley Drucker is the clarinettist, and Leonard Bernstein is conducting the New York Philharmonic. It is about seventeen minutes long and starts very quietly.

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That was Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. Stanley Drucker was the clarinettist, and Leonard Bernstein is conducted the New York Philharmonic.

Alright. Some more music featuring the clarinet. Best known for his revolutionary ballets of the second decade of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was also attracted to popular musical forms including ragtime and jazz. And from 1939 until his death in 1971 Stravinsky lived in the US. In 1945 the American band leader and clarinettist Woody Hermann commissioned him to write a work for solo clarinet and jazz band. This was a different deal to the Copland Concerto I just played which was quite deliberately for a soloist and a traditional orchestra. And the other quirky difference is that it was also intended for record release occupying one side of a 78 RPM disc… which is probably why the work is quite short.

Stravinsky called it his ‘Ebony Concerto’ using two meanings of ‘ebony’… the wood used to make some clarinets and, at the time, a flattering term for the skin colour of the musicians Stravinsky took inspiration from… including Art Tatum and Charlie Parker. In 1965 the composer conducted a recording with the clarinettist Benny Goodman and the Columbia Jazz Band. Here it is. It is in three parts and is about ten minutes long. It’s not quite jazz but it’s not quite classical music either… whatever that is. But it is some incredible music. Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Ebony Concerto’ featuring Benny Goodman.

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That was Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Ebony Concerto’ featuring Benny Goodman as soloist with the Columbia Jazz Band conducted by the composer.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have a one more piece coming up but before I get to them I want to give you 60 seconds of information that I hope you find useful… If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than a dozen, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net

And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes. I hope you have enjoyed this clarinet-focused episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, to finish this episode I have some music from one of my favourite living composers… the Jewish Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov. It is a work he wrote for string quartet and clarinet in the 1990s. He called it The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind and in a conversation with the writer Brooke Gladstone excerpted on the very helpful Los Angeles Philharmonic website… Golijov has this to say about the work…

“About eight hundred years ago, Isaac the Blind - who was the greatest Kabbalist rabbi of Provence – dictated a manuscript saying that everything in the universe, all things and events, are products of combinations of the Hebrew alphabet’s letters.

The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind is a kind of epic, a history of Judaism. It has Abraham, exile, and redemption. I never wrote it with this idea in mind, and only understood it when the work was finished. But while I was composing the second section, for example, my father would sit out on the deck with the newspaper, the sports pages, and every once in a while he would shout, "There you go! Another Yiddish chord!"

In another part of the conversation is this quite moving recollection that was also another motivation for the piece…

“I have this image of my great-grandfather, who shared my bedroom when I was seven. I’d wake up and see him by the window, praying in the early light. I think of him always praying, or fixing things, his pockets full of screws. I remember thinking, three of his children are dead; how does he still pray? Why does he still fix things? But we were taught that God had assigned that task of repairing the world to the Jewish people.”

So I think it is fair to say that Golijov is very directly honouring his Jewish heritage and one of the ways he does this is to use the style of ‘klezmer music’ in the piece. The term

‘Klezmer’ describes the instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for listening; these would have been played at weddings and other social functions. And to bring it all back to the clarinet… this was and remains one of the key instruments of klezmer music.

Here now is the second section of Osvaldo Golijov’s ‘The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac The Blind’. It is performed by the St Lawrence String Quartet and the clarinet is played by Todd Palmer. It starts quietly and is about 13 minutes long.

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That was the second section of Osvaldo Golijov’s ‘The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac The Blind’. It was performed by the St Lawrence String Quartet and the clarinet was played by Todd Palmer

Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’. This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

Next week’s episode will be the early music of Beethoven. Thanks for listening.