Volume 33 Number 3 June 2006 - International Clarinet Association

JEUNE ORCHESTRE
ATLANTIQUE
DISCOVERY COURSE
A Report by Marie Ross
In October 2005 the Jeune Orchestre
Atlantique held its first week-long
discovery course at the Abbaye aux
Dames in Saintes, France. The Jeune Or -
chestre Atlantique is a classical period
instrument training orchestra. This special
course, an idea of the clarinetist Jane
Booth, was designed for musicians used to
playing on modern instruments to learn
about and gain experience on period in -
struments. Ms. Booth plays principal clarinet
in the Orchestre des Champs-Ély sées
and is the education manager for the
orchestra as well as an avid teacher.
The course included both winds and
strings, and was taught by members of
the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, one of
Page 18
Europe’s premiere period-instrument or -
chestras. All of the teachers were proficient
in both French and English and
always repeated everything in both languages
for the sake of the many international
students.
Jane Booth brought many classical
reproduction clarinets with various numbers
of keys for the participants to play.
There were also basset clarinets and basset
horns which were passed around amongst
the group. The chance to play on so many
rare clarinets would be amazing for any
clarinetist, but this course was about forgetting
the virtuosic technicalities of an
instrument and focusing on the real ex -
pression of music. The students learned
from these truly masterful musicians how
a classical-period performer would make
a phrase, something that has been lost
through centuries of musical evolution.
One might think that learning to play
early clarinets with only a few keys would
be a huge shock compared to the modern
clarinet. It is a shock, but not in the way
THE CLARINET
one might expect. The first night many lips
were swollen from biting the clarinet
mouthpiece trying to force a “good” modern
sound out of the instrument. But soon
the participants were taught to relax and
play with the unique and personal colors of
the classical instruments. These instruments
are so much more flexible, and, as a
result, a player can achieve different pitches
and colors as a piece demands. These
ideas are all lost today with the generically
perfect sound of modern instruments,
which have evolved to the point of complete
stability and inflexibility.
Each day there were lectures given by
the teachers on various topics of period
music performance. One of the highlights
was Marcel Ponseele speaking about how
he made his own oboes. At first when he
said this would be his topic, a few students
thought he was joking because the idea of
making your own instrument is completely
foreign to most modern musicians. With
this came the realization that as musicians
living in our modern world, perhaps we
can never really understand classicalperiod
music as the musicians of the time
experienced it. He brought oboes in all
stages of assembly, some of his tools, and
even demonstrated how he constructs the
curved oboe da caccia. Seeing the raw
wood through its different stages as it was
being crafted into an oboe by one man as
opposed to the impersonal masses of modern
instruments pumped out by factories
was the essence of what period-instrument
playing is about.
Though a complete expert on the clarinet,
period and modern, Jane Booth
proved to be more of a musician than
merely a clarinet player. The students
spent hours frantically writing as Ms.
Booth talked about clarinet makers or different
equipment she experimented with to
achieve certain results. But one definitely
gets the feeling that to her the clarinet is
only an instrument used to express her
musical and creative ideas. This was a pervasive
theme of the course: that period
instrumentalists are seeking an individual
creativity that is too often lost in the cold
technical virtuosity that is prized today.
The afternoons were filled with trying
instruments, chamber music rehearsals and