Clarinet

• 1. Introduction

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  The clarinet's reed can stay clamped shut for as much as half of every second it plays, snapping open and closed to send tiny puffs of air down the tube. That flutter of a single reed against a mouthpiece is the entire secret behind an instrument capable of both a deep, murmuring bass and a piercing upper wail. Where did this single-reed design come from, why does a French-built clarinet sound different from a German one, and how did one instrument split into an entire family of different sizes and pitches? The story runs from a Baroque folk instrument called the chalumeau to jazz clubs, military bands, and the concert stages of Mozart and Beethoven.

• 2. The Chalumeau Becomes a Clarinet

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  Around 1700, the German instrument maker Johann Christoph Denner took an earlier single-reed instrument called the chalumeau and fitted it with a register key, creating the instrument that would become the clarinet. The chalumeau resembled a recorder with a single-reed mouthpiece and a cylindrical bore, but it lacked that register key and so was confined mostly to its lowest, or fundamental, register, a range of only about one and a half octaves. It had eight finger holes and a written pitch range from F3 to G4, and at the time players held the reed against the upper lip rather than the lower one, the opposite of modern practice. Denner, or possibly his son Jacob, equipped a chalumeau in the alto register with two keys. One of the keys opened a higher register that, unusually for a woodwind, began not an octave above the first register but an octave and a perfect fifth higher. A second key at the top extended the first register up to A4, and combined with the register key, up to B4. Denner later lengthened the instrument's bell and added a third key that pushed the range down to E3. The word for the new instrument likely reached English by way of the French clarinette, itself a diminutive of an Old French or Provençal word rooted in the Latin clarus, meaning clear or bright; the related Middle English word clarion named a type of trumpet. The earliest known reference to a clarinette is an order placed in 1710 by the Duke of Gronsfeld for two instruments made by Jacob Denner. The English spelling clarinet turns up by 1733, while the now-archaic clarionet was used from 1784 into the early 20th century. Players go by clarinetist in North American English or clarinettist in British English. After Denner's changes, other makers kept adding keys to improve tuning and fingering, and the chalumeau fell out of use entirely. By the time of Mozart, the clarinet typically carried five keys. Mozart asked for a version extended downward by four semitones to C, and the instrument maker Theodor Lotz built the result, a basset clarinet roughly 18 centimeters longer than the standard horn. By the era of Beethoven, roughly 1780 to 1820, the clarinet had become a permanent member of the orchestra.

• 3. A Century of New Keys

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  Felt pads on early clarinets sealed poorly, limiting how many keys an instrument could carry, until the inventor Iwan Müller solved the problem with a stuffed pad originally made of kid leather; combined with countersunk tone holes, it sealed the keyholes tightly enough to support far more keywork. In 1812, Müller unveiled a clarinet with seven finger holes and thirteen keys that he called the clarinet omnitonic because it could play in every key, ending the old practice of keeping differently tuned clarinets on hand. Müller is also credited with inventing the metal ligature and the thumb rest. In the late 1830s, the German flute maker Theobald Böhm devised a ring-and-axle key system for the flute. Between 1839 and 1843, the French clarinetist Hyacinthe Klosé worked with instrument maker Louis Auguste Buffet to adapt the idea to the clarinet, adding needle springs for the axles and ring keys that simplified difficult fingerings. They named their creation the Boehm clarinet even though Böhm had no hand in it, and its mechanism actually differs from the flute version. Other makers built rival systems starting in 1848, when Eugène Albert developed the Albert clarinet, based on Müller's design but adding a spectacle key patented by Adolphe Sax and rollers that eased little-finger movement; after 1861, a patent C sharp key by Joseph Tyler was added to other models. Around 1860, clarinetist Carl Baermann and maker Georg Ottensteiner patented an instrument with new connecting levers that let a single pad be operated by multiple fingerings. In the early 20th century, German clarinetist and maker Oskar Oehler introduced a clarinet with fingerings similar to Baermann's design but far more toneholes than the Boehm model. Oehler's instrument became known as the German clarinet, while the Boehm model came to be called the French clarinet, and the composer Richard Strauss observed that French clarinets have a flat, nasal tone while German ones approximate the singing voice. German and Austrian orchestras still favor the Oehler system today, while the Boehm system is standard almost everywhere else; some Dixieland players still use Albert system instruments, and the Reform Boehm system, pairing Boehm keywork with a German mouthpiece and bore, remains popular in the Netherlands.

• 4. The Physics of the Reed

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  A player's lips form an airtight seal around the mouthpiece and reed, and air blown past the reed makes it vibrate the way a flag flaps in a breeze. As mouth pressure builds, the reed vibrates further until it swings shut against the mouthpiece, then reopens either from its own springiness or from a returning pressure wave, releasing a fresh puff of air that travels down the tube at roughly three percent above the surrounding air pressure until it escapes at the nearest open hole or the end of the bore. That puff leaves behind a slight vacuum, a rarefaction wave that travels back up the tube and reflects off the sloping wall inside the mouthpiece, largely unaffected by whether the reed happens to be open at that instant. When the rarefaction reaches the open end of the tube, air rushes in to fill it, sending a compression wave back up the tube; reinforced by a fresh puff of air from the reed, that wave sets off on another round trip, repeating the cycle roughly every four pipe-lengths of travel. Alongside this core wave, imperfections in the reed's motion and in the bore create harmonics, of which mostly the odd ones are reinforced, giving the clarinet its distinctive tone. The bore itself is cylindrical along most of its length, with an inner diameter between 0.575 and 0.585 inches, though it narrows slightly in an hourglass shape near the joint between the upper and lower sections, a detail invisible to the eye but important for pitch and response. The flared bell at the bottom improves the tone of only the lowest notes in each register; for other notes it plays no acoustic role at all. Modern clarinets are generally tuned to 440 to 442 hertz, and most also feature undercut tone holes, chamfered on their inner edge, that let the air column follow the curve of the hole rather than blow past it in the upper registers. Because its bore is cylindrical rather than tapered like a recorder's, the clarinet overblows not at the octave but at the twelfth, a perfect fifth above the octave. Opening the register key stops the fundamental from reinforcing itself and instead makes the reed vibrate at three times the frequency, jumping the pitch a twelfth from the low chalumeau register into the brighter clarion register, while the altissimo register above it relies on even higher harmonics. Among the instrument's less common effects are vibrato, used by performers such as Richard Stoltzman despite its rarity in classical playing, along with glissando, growling, trumpet-like sounds, double and flutter tonguing, circular breathing, and experiments with quarter-tone clarinets.

• 5. Materials and Construction

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  Most wooden clarinets are cut from African blackwood, also called grenadilla, though makers have also used Honduran rosewood, cocobolo, and mopane, and historically boxwood and ebony. Since the mid-20th century, student and band-model clarinets are often molded from plastics such as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene; one early plastic blend, Resonite, was trademarked by the maker Selmer, while Buffet Crampon's Greenline model is a composite of resin and leftover grenadilla powder from wooden-clarinet production. Metal soprano clarinets were popular in the late 19th century, especially for military bands, and metal is still used for the bodies of some contra-alto and contrabass clarinets and for the necks and bells of most alto and larger instruments. The reed itself is cut from the cane of Arundo donax, though synthetic reeds also exist, and it vibrates against the mouthpiece opening to produce sound. Reeds are graded for hardness on a scale from one, soft, to five, hard, but that numbering is not standardized and varies between manufacturers. The mouthpiece and reed assembly attaches to a barrel, which can be swapped or pulled out slightly to adjust tuning; larger instruments use a curved metal neck instead. Below that, most clarinets have an upper joint operated mainly by the left hand and a lower joint operated mainly by the right hand, together carrying numerous tone holes, seven of them covered directly by the fingertips and the rest controlled by a set of 17 keys in the common Boehm-named system, alongside the separate Oehler system used in Germany and Austria and the related Albert system favored by some jazz, klezmer, and eastern European folk players. A cluster of keys near the bottom of the upper joint, known as the trill keys, is worked by the right hand, and the entire weight of smaller clarinets rests on the right thumb via a thumb rest, while larger instruments use a neck strap or floor peg instead. The bell at the bottom does not amplify sound but evens out the tone of the lowest notes in each register. In the 1930s, some makers built clarinets with filled plateau keys, intended for players wearing gloves in cold weather or switching over from saxophone or flute, though the extra cost and compromised sound quality limited their popularity.

• 6. A Family of Sizes

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  The clarinet family is the largest among woodwinds, spanning from the BBb contrabass up to the Ab piccolo clarinet, and among all of them the Bb soprano clarinet is by far the most common, so much so that the word clarinet on its own usually means that instrument. Except for instruments built in C, every clarinet in the family is a transposing instrument: those pitched higher than C sound higher than written, such as the Ab clarinet a sixth higher, while longer ones sound lower, such as the Bb clarinet by a whole tone or the Bb contrabass clarinet by two octaves and a tone. The Ab or G piccolo clarinet is the highest-pitched clarinet still made; it served in 19th-century European military bands and the onstage bandas of Italian opera and occasionally appears in 20th-century orchestral works. The Eb clarinet, smaller than the standard Bb instrument, has a hard, biting tone used for brightness or comic effect in orchestras, concert bands, and clarinet choirs, and composers from Berlioz to Mahler have written solo passages for it. The D clarinet, largely replaced by the Eb, appeared in concertos by Johann Melchior Molter, operas by Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, and both the D and Eb instruments used together in Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. The C clarinet, common in the instrument's earliest period, had become practically obsolete by the end of the 1920s as orchestral players preferred to transpose parts onto the mellower Bb instrument instead of carrying an extra horn. The A clarinet remains a staple of 19th-century orchestral and chamber repertoire, while the G clarinet is used mainly in Turkish music. The basset clarinet, most often built in A but also made in C, G, and Bb, exists chiefly to play Classical-era works, and modern versions with updated keywork have been built since 1951 for historically informed performances. The basset horn, typically pitched in F, resembles the Eb alto clarinet but has a narrower bore; Mozart's Requiem is considered a cornerstone of its repertoire. The alto clarinet, in Eb or F, serves mostly in military and concert bands; the F version was a favorite of Iwan Müller before falling out of use. The bass clarinet, in Bb, entered orchestral music in the 1830s after Adolphe Sax redesigned it and has since become a mainstay of the orchestra, concert band, and jazz ensemble alike, notably in the hands of jazz musician Eric Dolphy. The German maker Streitwolf built the first contra-alto clarinet, in F, in 1829, and modern Boehm and Oehler versions followed in the 1950s. The contrabass clarinet, in Bb, appears mainly in clarinet ensembles and concert bands. Rarest of all is the octocontrabass clarinet: a prototype built by Leblanc in 1939 reached one octave below the contrabass, and in 2025 the German maker Martin Foag introduced a version extending down to a sounding Bb.

• 7. Mozart to the Concert Hall

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  An orchestra's two clarinetists typically carry both a Bb and an A instrument, alternating between them within a single piece, a practice rooted partly in acoustics. Before airtight pads existed around 1800, woodwinds could carry only a few keys, and because the clarinet's low chalumeau register spans a twelfth before overblowing rather than an octave like an oboe, flute, bassoon, or saxophone, it needed keywork for nineteen notes rather than twelve just to play chromatically in one key. Better keywork later reduced that need, but the tradition of carrying both A and Bb instruments persisted because the lower-pitched horns sound mellower, and the brighter-sounding C clarinet fell out of favor by around 1850 even as some composers kept writing parts for it. The clarinet's orchestral career began later than other woodwinds. Vivaldi's 1716 oratorio Juditha triumphans called for two C clarinets, and Handel's 1740 Ouverture used two clarinets and horn; the Neapolitan composer Gregorio Sciroli wrote the first clarinet sonata in 1770. Johann Stamitz composed the first known Bb clarinet concerto for the orchestra of La Pouplinière in Paris in the 1750s, while Johann Melchior Molter wrote six concertos for the D clarinet starting around 1742. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first used the clarinet in his 1771 Divertimento K. 113 and featured it in every opera from Idomeneo onward, along with his symphonies and piano concertos. He wrote the Gran Partita, the Clarinet Quintet, and the Kegelstatt Trio for his friend, the virtuoso clarinetist Anton Stadler, and composed his Clarinet Concerto for Stadler's extended basset clarinet, with passages reaching down to C3. Beethoven gave the instrument prominent chamber roles in his Quintet Op. 16, Septet Op. 20, and Trio Op. 38. Romantic composers folded the clarinet fully into the orchestra, with Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Dvořák, Smetana, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov all writing prominent passages for it, and opera scores such as Strauss's Elektra calling for as many as eight clarinetists at once. Chamber works multiplied too: Schubert's Octet, Mendelssohn's sonata with piano, Schumann's Phantasiestücke and Märchenerzählungen, Brahms's two sonatas plus his Trio and Clarinet Quintet, and several major works by Carl Maria von Weber, including two concertos and the Grand Duo Concertant. Yet from 1830 to 1900, no major composer wrote a clarinet concerto that found a lasting place in the repertoire. The 20th century made up for it: the clarinet plays the cat in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Stravinsky wrote his unaccompanied Three Pieces in 1919, Olivier Messiaen wrote a solo movement for the instrument within his 1941 Quatuor pour la fin du temps, and Carl Nielsen and Aaron Copland each wrote concertos with orchestra. Sonatas followed from Felix Draeseke, Max Reger, Arnold Bax, John Ireland, Francis Poulenc, Leonard Bernstein, and Paul Hindemith, alongside chamber works by Alban Berg, Béla Bartók, Stravinsky again in The Soldier's Tale, and Darius Milhaud. Concert bands typically field three or four separate Bb clarinet parts, and author Eric Hoeprich has argued that the instrument's role in military bands was ultimately what secured its lasting popularity. Ensembles made entirely of clarinets, known as clarinet choirs, first appeared in 1927.

• 8. Jazz, Rock, and Folk Traditions

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  The clarinet anchored early jazz starting in the 1910s and stayed central through the big band era into the 1940s; one of its most recognizable moments is the virtuoso glissando opening George Gershwin's 1924 Rhapsody in Blue, and swing-era players Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw became stars by the late 1930s. From the 1940s onward the instrument's prominence faded as the saxophone, with its more powerful sound and simpler fingering, took over the lead role, though the clarinet survived through the Dixieland revival of traditional New Orleans jazz led by performers such as Pete Fountain. Later players kept the instrument alive in jazz, including Stan Hasselgård, Jimmy Giuffre, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Perry Robinson, and John Carter, with Eddie Daniels, Don Byron, Marty Ehrlich, and Ken Peplowski carrying the tradition forward from the 1980s. Rock music has used the clarinet only occasionally, though Jerry Martini played it on Sly and the Family Stone's 1968 hit Dance to the Music, and the Beatles included a trio of clarinets in When I'm Sixty-Four from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. A Billboard reviewer described a Benny Goodman-flavored clarinet solo in Supertramp's title track Breakfast in America. The instrument also holds a lasting place in vernacular music worldwide, featuring prominently in klezmer, Brazilian choro, Albanian saze, Greek kompania folk music, and Bulgarian wedding music. In Turkish folk music, players often reach for the Albert-system clarinet in G, an instrument commonly called simply the Turkish clarinet.