From the Beginning: Starting a Clarinet Choir—a Checklist for Teachers

by Margaret Thornhill

Welcome to the new Clarinet Choir column! In coming issues, I’ll profile news of groups throughout the world, review new CD releases, and offer recommendations for familiar and hot-off-the-press repertoire. Readers are invited to send me their discoveries and comments.

Why a clarinet choir?

Since the majority of non-players are unfamiliar with clarinet choirs, the whole idea remains somewhat of a joke for most audiences—until they actually hear a group, that is. It’s really all about the sound. Unlike shawm bands or flute choirs, clarinet choirs are anchored by a true bass, and the sound of multiple clarinets is capable of great flexibility and emotional depth—not at all fatiguing to listen to.

Who plays in clarinet choirs?

Two and a half years ago, on a whim and a dare, I advertised that I was starting a “summer clarinet choir.” An initial handful of players became the Los Angeles Clarinet Choir, which performed at the ICA Clarinetfest in Vancouver. I hadn’t expected this level of commitment: all these people were looking for a challenging chamber music experience and willing to regularly sacrifice their Saturday afternoons for the long term. Although the individual members are quite accomplished (most have college degrees in clarinet performance), it is a once a week community group—amateur in the best sense of the word. About half of our members do occasional paid gigs; most also play in other groups; all work outside music or at least part-time in music education as a day job.

Sarkis Hardy, who left clarinet after his bachelor’s recital to work in other professions and came back to serious performance two years ago, feels that the chamber music aspect of clarinet choir is what draws him to it. “In our group,” he writes, “with two or three people on a part, the individual player is important. How well you play has an impact on the performance of the group. I feel more challenged than I would in a community band.”

Clarinet choirs also build a support community for their members. They can be an ideal extension of a teacher’s studio, or create opportunities for players in the community to form new friendships, offer advice, share technical lore, or even trade students and gigs. But it’s really all about the music.

Rehearsals

A once a week rehearsal schedule brings special problems, as most conductors of volunteers groups know. One benefit is that players with a slower learning curve have plenty of time to pull their skills together. The single greatest problem is retention: the great accomplishments of the previous rehearsal have to be revived the following week, not quite from zero, but almost. There’s a certain build up of achievement over time, and for this to happen, it’s best to have a lot of rehearsals, which means, in a large group, that there will also be numerous rehearsals where one or two players are missing. The freelance gig strategy of a few rehearsals all at once before a concert doesn’t suit a group with varied day jobs living all over a metropolis with sluggish commute patterns.

Where to begin

1. Start by finding ensemble music of easy to moderate difficulty that interests you. While it’s an essential job of the music director/coach to pick pieces that are a good fit with your membership, you can’t predict in advance the abilities of players you haven’t met.

2. Plan to audition your prospective members carefully including sight reading from the most and least challenging works you hope to perform. If a player doesn’t “get it” right away—let him try again. You’ll find out how quick she is to improve; how responsive he is to suggestions, both important qualities.

3. Whatever your target membership, your goal is a group of people that doesn’t have too wide a gap between strongest and the weakest. As with any instrumental chamber group, if you have very advanced players in the group, it’s critical that less-skilled auditionees (your potential 3rd clarinets) can play in rhythm and in tune and have the technique to succeed in ‘keeping up.” Don’t feel that you need to accept all comers if they are not a fit: there’s nothing more humiliating than being a musical “bad hire”.

Repertoire

The easiest works for a new group to learn to play well and in tune will have a chorale-like, chordal texture. These exploit the organ-like blend and vocal phrasing of the medium, ideal since your first job as conductor or coach is to build a sound and a sense of ensemble for the group.

My group started out using clarinet quartet arrangements with two-on-a-part and doubling the 4th clarinet part at the octave with bass. We added auxiliary instruments as we went along. If this is your situation, you might look for classical quartet arrangements by well known clarinetist-arrangers such as Gee, Hite, Heim. Gordon Jacob’s delightful original quintet with bass, Scherzo, Pavane and Gopak sounds great with nine clarinets. James Rae’s popular quartet arrangement of Selections from Threepenny Opera (Universal Edition) also works well with this kind of doubling. With nine sopranos and no bass, you can try Peter Schickele’s elegant, cool-jazz Monochrome.

As your group expands to include alto and contrabass, you can access standard repertoire. The beloved arrangement of Debussy’s Petite Suite by Russell Howland (Fema Music) distributes melodic material among all parts while demanding a commitment to tone and blend.This arrangement can be played by a minimum of 9 players: cl 1, 2, 3, alto, bass and contra.(Make sure you have at least 6 sopranos, two on each of the three parts). Of the four movements in this arrangement, sold as separate pieces, I’ve found Cortege, Ballet and En Bateau to be most successful.

Harmony Clarinets

This is where the difficulties multiply. It’s worth it to let your players know that you are looking for experienced performers of sopranino, alto and contra.

In school settings, less developed players are often recruited to play these parts, which can have disastrous results for intonation. What you really want are very able players who like these auxiliary instruments and are willing to practice them, get suitable mouthpieces, etc. In a non-school setting, you will need to find people who already play and own these instruments or provide them yourself.

Although central to the clarinet choir repertoire, Alto clarinet has long been considered to be the runt of the clarinet litter in terms of its basic design. We frequently use basset horn instead and transpose the part, to take advantage of its more predictable scale and response. However, our basset hornist has also been very pleased with the intonation and response of his new Yamaha alto clarinet, which means that the part can be covered as written.

Most arrangements come with both contra and contra-alto parts, which are usually the same part in transposition. Our 14-member group balances best with only one or the other.

In a school context, your bass may be determined by what instrument you own, what player can manage it. With a choice, the tone and intonation of the contralto promotes a better, more refined blend (the instrument itself doesn’t have the buzzy woofiness of the “paperclip” contrabass). But—be careful to use the instrument actually called for by the composer or arranger. Contra-alto has a shorter range than contrabass, and many of the contra-alto parts available as “alternates” in arrangements compensate for this by writing the lowest notes of the bass part up an octave, in contrary motion to or even crossing the bass clarinet, an unsatisfactory compromise.

Adding the E-flat

The E-flat clarinet is an outspoken member of the clarinet family. It lends color and wonderful character to the sound of the group, but it is difficult to play in tune with itself, let alone with other lower clarinets. The use of the E-flat clarinet in clarinet choir arrangements should parallel its orchestral use as a doubling and character solo instrument rather than as a lead solo voice. Transcriptions that cast it as the first violin part (instead of clarinet 1) are risky business! No matter how skilled the player, the part is always very exposed.

My advice is not to feel an obligation to add E-flat clarinet immediately, especially if you don’t have a skilled and dedicated player lined up. There are plenty of arrangements without E-flat: check the catalogues of Southern Music and Kendor Music publishers for suggestions. A fun original work without E-flat is the three-movement Klezmer Suite by Alex Ciesla which includes parts for five sopranos, bass clarinet, contrabass (string bass part in C, but we transposed this for B-flat contrabass clarinet) and optional tambourine.

Other well-known original works for full clarinet choir with an E-flat part of musical challenge but reasonable difficulty are Chorale and Danza by Vaclav Nelhybel (one of the finest short original pieces for clarinet choir) and the melodious, well-crafted Introduction and Rondo by Gordon Jacob.

The presence of more than one accomplished E-flat player in my group has enabled us to play standard orchestral transcriptions such as the Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro arranged by Lucien Caillet (which includes a second optional E-flat alternative to an A-flat sopranino descant).

Intonation and Tuning

You guessed it: the single greatest performance problem of clarinet choirs is playing in tune. Taking the advice of Peter Hadcock (in his orchestral excerpt study manual, The Working Clarinetist) we now tune 15 minutes into the rehearsal: the clarinets will not be fully warmed up until then. This is particularly true, we find, of the metal “paperclip” contrabass.

After spending five years early in my teaching life conducting a college wind ensemble, I’m persuaded that the best tuning is from the bottom up: start with the tuba. Contrabass may be the most problematic, inflexible instrument we have, but if the basses are not in tune with each other, all is lost! For many musicians, the perception of intonation is linked to tone and contra is hard to hear. We tune only the first bass player to the contrabass using concert B-flat, which seems to be more stable on contrabass than concert A. The first bass player tunes the back row, then the first clarinetist, who tunes the front row individually. Individual tuning works best if the player giving the note plays and then stops, and the player tuning tries the pitch by himself and then repeats the process if necessary.

In concert, we find it necessary to tune frequently: 3 or 4 times during an hour of music. The front row and back row seem to go out of tune at unequal rates. We occasionally do intonation exercises, balancing chords, or playing scales in unison/octaves in double whole notes.

Playing through a chorale at the beginning of rehearsal is also a good opportunity to refine tone and pitch and balance chords. For an entire year we used Daniel Dorff’s arrangement of Mozart’s Ave Verum (a quartet with bass) as both a chorale warm up and as a concert selection, adding contra below the bass part and basset to clarinet 3.

Expanding the group

As your group expands, it will help to articulate your vision of its maximum size. A clarinet orchestra of 60 is a very different animal than a clarinet choir of 12.

For me, having more than three soprano clarinets on a part creates a tipping point. I personally prefer the more chamber-like sound of a smaller group, and we decided on 14 as our optimal number, adding players as needed. With half a dozen players who double on extended range instruments (three who play E-flat, four or five doublers basses, three who own and play contras) our group has been fortunate to have a lot of flexibility.

Wonderful clarinet choirs can be found in all sizes throughout the world.

Next time, we’ll interview some of their leaders about rehearsal strategies.

Copyright 2007, Margaret Thornhill. All Rights Reserved. A version of this article appeared in the March 2007 issue of The Clarinet.