Origins

Abstract The word ‘clarinet’ was classified by Hornbostel and Sachs (1914) as a generic term for all pipes, usually made of cane, in which the sound is produced through the vibration of a single reed which is either cut from the pipe itself (idioglot) or produced separately and attached to a mouthpiece (heteroglot) (NGDMI ‘Reed instruments’; Sachs 1930: 338). This book includes the further stipulation that the clarinet is an instrument which overblows, functionally, at the interval of a twelfth above the fundamental notes (NGDMI ‘Overblowing’). These two characteristics-the production of sound by means of a mouthpiece with a single, vibrating reed and a cylindrically bored body providing the capability of being overblown at the twelfth-are what distinguish the present-day clarinet from all other woodwind instruments. To examine the clarinet’s ‘prehistory’, however, we will use Hornbostel’s and Sachs’ generic definition. The more specific definition will become useful when we discuss the earliest manifestations of the eighteenth century clarinet and distinguish these from the closest relative of the clarinet-the chalumeau with a heteroglot reed.