Clarinet Music Quotes

I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?

I turned to the clarinets. They were a resourceful lot.

All music is what awakes within us when we are reminded by the instruments; It is not the violins or the clarinets - It is not the beating of the drums - Nor the score of the baritone singing his sweet romanza; not that of the men's chorus, Nor that of the women's chorus - It is nearer and farther than they

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

India is constipated with a lot of humbug. Take modern Indian music of the films. It is all tango & rhumba or samba played on Hawaiian guitars, violins, accordions & clarinets. It is ugly. It must be scrapped like the rest.

There once was a girl who found herself dead. She spent her days peering over the ledge of heaven, her chin in her palm. She was bored as a brick, hadn't adjusted yet to the slower pace of heavenly life. Her sister would look up at her and wave, and the dead girl would wave back but she was too far away for her sister to see. The dead girl thought her sister might be writing her notes, but it was too long a trip to make for a few scattered words here and there so she let them be. And then, one day, her earthbound sister finally realized she could hear music up there in heaven, so after that, everything her sister needed to tell her she did through her clarinet and each time she played, the dead girl jumped up (no matter what else she was doing), and danced.

Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.

She realized now that she had been expecting old-fashioned instruments – pipes, fifes, fiddles and tinny drums. Instead there came the cocksure, brassy warble of a saxophone, the blare of a cornet and the squeak and trill of a clarinet being made to work for its living. Not-Triss had heard jazz with neatly wiped shoes and jazz with gritty soles and a grin. And this too was jazz, but barefoot on the grass and blank-eyed with bliss, its musical strands irregular as wind gusts and unending as ivy vines.

I’ve brought you some things from home,’ I said, gesturing at the bag on the floor. ‘Some clothes and books – things like that.’ ‘Books – great! That’ll make things easier. You know I can’t read worth a damn right now!’ ‘There’s also some music. Schubert’s fifth, Mendelssohn’s third, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, Mahler’s fourth—’ ‘I would have preferred his sixth.’ ‘You’re not well enough for his sixth'.

Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties.

He then expounded a remarkable theory, which had occurred to him while he was playing the clarinet during one of the power cuts that the French electricity board arranges at regular intervals. Electricity, he said, is a matter of science and logic. Classical music is a matter of art and logic. Vous voyez? Already one sees a common factor. And when you listen to the disciplined and logical progression of some of Mozart's work, the conclusion is inescapable: Mozart would have made a formidable electrician.

I was regarded by my parents as having little musical talent other than a thin, nasal soprano voice. I was forbidden to touch my father's clarinets or saxophones, just my harmonica.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ’cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color.

She was my sister, beloved, who had stayed in my room around the clock when I’d been eight and suffered with a case of the flu that nearly killed me. She was my sister, whose clarinet playing inspired me to find the music in me, to settle on the saxophone, which had fast become the key to my identity. I loved her as I loved no one else, as no others had allowed me to love them, and if I were to kill her under the influence of some malign spirit, I might as well then kill myself.

The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their insturments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm.

And when she played the clarinet it was as though the music came not from the instrument but straight out of her body, only passing through the clarinet to pick up some sweetness and sadness, and taking you to a real, silent place where there is no enemy, no struggle, and where everything is free from shame and treachery and clear of thoughts of betrayal.

The cream of the Negro musicians then in France, like Cricket Smith on the trumpet, Louis Jones on the violin, Palmer Jones at the piano, Frank Withers on the clarinet, and Buddy Gilmore at the drums, would weave out music that would almost make your heart stand still at dawn in a Paris night club in the rue Pigalle, when most of the guests were gone and you were washing the last pots and pans in a two-by-four kitchen, with the fire in the range dying and the one high window letting the soft dawn in.

And here’s Miss Carroll’s house who taught me clarinet, except one day I rang the doorbell and got no answer and it turned out she’d run off with Mr. Surrey from the auto-parts store who was married and had five children.” Derek said, “I didn’t know you played the clarinet.” She drew in a breath to speak but then just stared at him, because what? Oh, boys were such foreigners. (Not for the first time, she wished she’d had a brother or two.) A girl would have begged for every detail about Miss Carroll’s running off. “Well, not anymore,” she said finally. “I wasn’t very musical.

And so it began. He played “Begin the Beguine” against Tessie’s collarbone. He played “Moonface” against her smooth cheeks. Pressing the clarinet right up against the red toenails that had so dazzled him, he played “It Goes to Your Feet.” With a secrecy they didn’t acknowledge, Milton and Tessie drifted off to quiet parts of the house, and there, lifting her skirt a little, or removing a sock, or once, when nobody was home, pulling up her blouse to expose her lower back, Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.

The viola and the clarinet made for an interesting pairing: we had to imagine the accompaniment of other instruments, ideally a violin and a cello.

As soon as we had the music arranged on our stands, Conductor Li tapped his baton on the lectern and called us to attention. "Quiet please, comrades! And as we play just think of the Long March," he said. "I will be at the front, like Chairman Mao. I will beat the time. Try to keep up. If you get lost, skip a few pages. Hopefully, the rest of us will pass your way eventually... The first movement sounded like nothing less than a full-scale military retreat. We were ambushed by missing pages of score, by an impulsive feint by the cellists and double basses, and by a flautist who turned two pages rather than one and played along happily in no man's land for a dozen or so bars until he was rapped on the head with the end of a clarinet

I have no musical talent. My clarinet sounded like an apoplectic yak. For the brief days I blew the trumpet, a hostile-sounding pig snorted along in jerky fits and starts with the rest of the irritated band. I never knew when a sound was actually going to come out of the horn and it always startled me when it did. My violin unleashed a trio of enraged, tone-deaf banshees, and I couldn’t blow the flute well enough to make any more sound than with my lower lip on a soda bottle. Something about the pucker eluded me. The drums turned my arms into a pretzel-prison from which there was no escape. I would have given the tambourine a try—I really think I might have excelled at the hip-bump—but sadly the instrument wasn’t offered at my school. I think that’s why I love my iPod so much. I have music in my soul and can’t get it out.

Jazz is a strange music. Jazz is where you find it. You dig all day in the mine, handling those big lumpy dead rocks; that’s the popular music, the dead stuff. And then all of a sudden you come on a bright gleaming streak embedded in the dead rock; it’s alive, it’s gold. That’s how you find jazz. So many people have never heard jazz, because they’ve found nothing but the slag, the dead ore in which it’s cased. They hear the raw material, the nondescript popular song; they may never be lucky enough to be present when inspired musicians strike away the lumpy death and bring out the life. The trumpet states a theme; it isn’t a hell of a good theme and in the song it means little or nothing. He strips it down to its bare chords, throws its thin line of melody out there for a start. The clarinet invents a counter-melody for himself, an invention as carefully wrought, as musicianly, as anything Bach ever wrote down. And then the trombone sings; there is a complete perfection, coming close to the unbearable, in the addition of that third voice to the polyphony of true jazz. Out of nothing something of beauty has been created; you have heard jazz, and you are lucky. You are even more lucky if you have created jazz, if you can sit with the gut-searing vibrations of a trombone mouthpiece kicking back against your face and feel the music down into your feet.

I don’t think she’s really gone…’ Robert hesitates. ‘I just think we can’t see her any more.’ ‘What do you mean?’ He straightens up, then hunches forward on his knees. ‘I was reading this thing by St Augustine…’ ‘I didn’t know you’re religious.’ ‘I’m not, really. But he wrote some pretty good stuff. There’s this bit where he’s talking about time, and how it’s just an illusion.’ Ella frowns. ‘Then what are clocks doing?’ ‘They’re measuring the teeth on a cog, or the number of times a pendulum has gone back and forth…’ He looks at Ella’s frown. ‘I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. But what he’s saying is, there’s no such thing as the past or the future, just this big, eternal now.’ Ella tries to get her head around this, craning her neck so she’s looking right up through the gaps in the clouds. The stars flicker. ‘Nope, I don’t get it.’ ‘Well, he compares it to a poem…but you could imagine it like a record.’ ‘A record?’ ‘Yeah, imagine a seventy-eight.’ Ella closes her eyes and pictures the record. ‘So, you put it on the turntable and listen to the first verse of the song, then there’s a chorus, then another verse. While you’re listening to the second verse, the first verse is still there, spinning around on the record, but you’re not listening to it any more. St Augustine said that the record is like a human life, or all of human history.’ Ella thinks for a moment. The idea is starting to take shape in her head as she imagines the shiny black disc, spinning on its axis. She’s not sure if it makes sense or not, but the idea is attractive. She thinks of all the people who have gone before them, their lives still spinning through infinity like silent songs. ‘So where’s Rene, in this metaphor?’ ‘She’s like…’ Robert thinks for a moment. ‘She’s like a clarinet solo in the first verse. A beautiful solo, harmonizing with the melody. And then she stops, and she doesn’t repeat again for the rest of the song…but she’s still there, on the record.

The Lusty Month of May” continues to develop Guenevere as a heroine of operetta in a lighthearted song, which is both naïve and highly suggestive. With the abundance of “tra-las” and an up-tempo chorus joining in the fun, Knapp’s parallels to operetta are more than apt. The clarity, wide range, and versatility of Andrews’s voice only enhance the effect. Andrews never sacrifices vocal precision or tone despite the focus on clever wordplay and a bouncy, allegretto tune. This tune is more virtuosic than “Simple Joys” with additional melodic leaps and the possibility for displays in a higher range. Loewe uses a C♯ diminished chord to denote Guenevere’s lustful feelings, often punctuating lyrics such as “lusty” or “libelous,” in the otherwise carefree milieu of C major. The generally light orchestration favors the string section, similar to “Simple Joys,” and also features a harp. When woodwinds enter, clarinets tend to dominate. At this point, this instrumentation characterizes Guenevere’s musical self and augments her connection to operetta as it reinforces the sense of frivolity. The call-and-response with the chorus further heightens the sense of abandon, which increases throughout the song. Guenevere has not lost her youthful taste for ribaldry during her marriage with Arthur.

Bryan Ferry: ‘It’s always sad when I go back to Newcastle and see that certain places don’t exist any more. But it’s great that one shop – which was very important for me also – is still there, in a wonderful old arcade, with extravagant tiled floors, rather like the Bond Street arcades. It’s a shop called Windows, which is a family music shop and the only place you really go to buy records. The windows are full of clarinets, saxophones, electric guitars – a proper music shop, which sold everything. But just to see a trumpet in the window – a real instrument, to look at it and study it!

A good hollow bone, tapped smartly by another, can be made to emit a most satisfactory note of recognisable pitch; and the effect of tapping a row of empty skull-bones was no doubt one of musical man's earliest ghoulish delights.

Take art and music. Why has contemporary Indian painting, music, architecture and sculpture been such a flop? Because it keeps harking back to BC. Harking back would be all right if it did not become a pattern—a deadweight. If it does, then we are in a cul-de-sac of art forms. We explain the unattractive by pretending it is esoteric. Or we break out altogether—like modern Indian music of the films. It is all tango and rhumba or samba played on Hawaiian guitars, violins, accordions and clarinets. It is ugly. It must be scrapped like the rest.

The first time I heard jazz, I had just moved to New York. One day I was wandering around Manhattan, looking for work, and there were these two guys on a corner. One played the banjo; the other was on the clarinet, improvising. There was a hat for people to drop coins in, but I was the only one paying them any attention. Even though I didn’t know a thing about jazz I could tell they were amateurs. But there was something about the music. It was sweet. And spicy. Kind of complicated. A little low-down. And intricate. And a little naughty.

The clarinet is waiting for me by the chair in the common room, a constant that has held for me in even the worst of times. Now, in the great tempest of my life, I am the one that abandoned it. I suspect that’s how it began, me denying music my talent and instead giving that time over to Isaac, forsaking my mind for my body, not knowing that the last did not belong entirely to me. And so Shanna erupted, tearing into my life as she destroyed it.

Language ​A mangle and an earthly remnant that the poet leans on more heavily than all others, is language.  At times he can rightly hate, accuse, and curse it—or rather himself, that he is born to work with this wretched tool.  With envy he thinks of the painter, whose language—the colors—speaks just as understandably to all mankind, from the North Pole down to Africa, or the musician, whose tones speak every human language as well, and which from the single-voiced melody to the polyphonic orchestra, from the horn to the clarinet, from the fiddle to the harp, must obey like many new, singular, fine, and differing languages.  ​But for one thing especially he envies the musician deeply and daily: that the musician has his language for himself alone, only for making music!  But for his activity the poet must use the same language in which you hold school and do business, in which you telegraph and hold court.  How poor he is, that for his art he owns no private organ, no personal abode, no private garden, no personal window to look out onto the moon—all and all he must partake in everyday life!  He says “heart” and means the pulsing core of life in man, his innermost capability and weakness; but then the word at the same time signifies a muscle.  He says “power”, then he must fight for the sense of his word with engineers and electricians; he says “bliss”, then something from theology gazes onto his imagination’s expression.  He can use no private word that doesn’t leer at once to another side, that doesn’t with a breath recall foreign, disturbed, hostile imaginations, that isn’t deceive by scruples and shortenings, and broken by narrow walls, from which a voice turns back unsounded and smothered. ​If a knave is someone who gives more than he has, then a poet can never be a knave.  There is not a tenth, not a hundredth of what he would like to give; he is satisfied if the hearer understands him from totally above him, then entirely from far, then completely incidentally, most importantly at least not grossly misunderstands.  He seldom reaches more.  And overall, where a poet reaps praise or criticism, where he makes effects or gets mocked, where someone loves him or rejects him, one speaks not from his thoughts and dreams alone, but only a hundredth that could squeeze through the narrow canal of language and through the no wider comprehension of reading.

It ain't my idea to leave before dawn. My ole lady decided to visit Nana, that's why the house stinks of hairspray. You know why she's leaving early: so nobody sees her scurry through town on foot. All she wants is for them to see her arrived, all hunky-dory. Not scurrying. It's a learning I made since the car went. 'Well I just can't believe there isn't a pair of Tumbledowns around town, I mean, I'll have to try down by Nana's.' She gives off breathy noises, and flicks her fingertips through my hair. Then she takes a step back and frowns. It means goodbye. 'Promise me you won't miss your therapy.' An electric purple sky spills stars behind the pumpjack, calling home the last moths for the night. It reminds me of the morning when ole Mrs Lechuga was out here, all devastated. I try not to think about it. Instead I look ahead to today. Going to Keeter's is a smart idea; if anybody sees me out there, they'll say, 'We saw Vernon out by Keeter's,' and nobody will know if they mean the auto shop, or the piece of land. See? Vernon Gray-matter Little. In return, I've asked Fate to help me solve the cash thing. It's become clear that cash is the only way to deal with problems in life. I even scraped up a few things to pawn in town, if it comes to that. I know it'll come to that, so I have them with me in my pack – my clarinet, my skateboard, and fourteen music discs. They're in the pack with my lunchbox, which contains my sandwich, the two joints, and a piece of paper with some internet addresses on it. As for the joints and the piece of paper, I heard the voice of Jesus last night. He advised me to get wasted, fast. If at first you don't succeed, he said, get wasted off your fucken ass. My plan is to sit out at Keeter's and get some new ideas, ideas borne out of the bravery of wastedness. I ride down empty roads of frosted silver, trees overhead swish cool hints of warm panties in bedclothes. Liberty Drive is naked, save for droppings of hay, and Bar-B-Chew Barn wrappers. In this light you can't see the stains on the sidewalk by the school. As the gym building passes by, all hulky and black, I look the other way, and think of other things. Music's a crazy thing, when you think about it. Interesting how I decided which discs not to pawn. I could've kept some party music, but that would've just tried to boost me up, all this thin kind of 'Tss-tss-tss,' music. You get all boosted up, convinced you're going to win in life, then the song's over and you discover you fucken lost. That's why you end up playing those songs over and over, in case you didn't know. Cream pie, boy. I could've kept back some heavy metal too, but that's likely to drive me to fucken suicide. What I need is some Eminem, some angry poetry, but you can't buy that stuff in Martirio. Like it was an animal sex doll or something, you can't buy angry poetry. When you say gangsta around here, they still think of Bonnie & fucken Clyde. Nah, guess what: I ended up keeping my ole Country albums. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Paycheck – even my daddy's ole Hank Williams compilation. I kept them because those boys have seen some shit – hell, all they sing about is the shit they've seen; you just know they woke up plenty of times on a wooden floor somewhere, with ninety flavors of trouble riding on their ass. The slide-guitar understands your trouble. Then all you need is the beer.

She asked me if I would visit the music class sometime and speak to the kids about the viability of a music career. A few months later I found myself there in that same music room, talking to the kids and jamming out for them. The kids were beautiful, the jamming and talking was cool, but I walked away from the experience shaken. The last time I had been in that room was twenty years before, and it had been packed full of kids playing French horns, clarinets, violins, basses, trombones, flutes, tympani, and saxophones, all under the capable instruction of orchestra teacher Mr. Brodsky. It was a room alive with sound and learning! Any instrument a kid wanted to play was there to be learned and loved. But on this day, there were no instruments, no rustling of sheet music, no trumpet spit muddying the floor, no ungodly cacophony of squeaks and wails driving Mr. Brodsky up a fucking wall. There was a volunteer teacher, a group of interested kids, and a boom box. A music appreciation class. All the arts funding had been cut the year after I left Fairfax, under the auspices of a ridiculous law called Proposition 13, a symptom of the Reaganomics trickle-down theory. I was shocked to realize that these kids didn’t get an opportunity to study an instrument and blow in an orchestra. I thought back to the dazed days when I would show up to school after one of Walter’s violent episodes, and the peace I found blowing my horn in the sanctuary of that room. I thought of the dreams Tree and I shared there of being professional musicians, before going over to his house to be inspired by the great jazzers. Because I loved playing in the orchestra I’d be there instead of out doing dumb petty crimes. I constantly ditched school, but the one thing that kept me showing up was music class. FUCK REAGANOMICS. Man, kids have different types of intelligences, some arts, some athletics, some academics, but all deserve to be nurtured, all deserve a chance to shine their light.

She realized now that she had been expecting old-fashioned instruments – pipes, fifes, fiddles and tinny drums. Instead there came the cocksure, brassy warble of a saxophone, the blare of a cornet and the squeak and trill of a clarinet being made to work for its living. Not-Triss had heard jazz with neatly wiped shoes and jazz with gritty soles and a grin. And this too was jazz, but barefoot on the grass and blank-eyed with bliss, its musical strands irregular as wind gusts and unending as ivy vines.

The moment when it crystallized for me was in early 1999. Due to the vicissitudes of my freelancing schedule, I ended up playing Holst’s The Planets three times with three different orchestras in a six-month period. Maybe you know that piece. There are recycled versions of it in everything John Williams swiped for the Star Wars movies and everything bombastic and shallow you’ve ever been annoyed by in every action movie of the last twenty years, plus the horrible Phrygian raised fourth that was everywhere in early twentieth-century English classical music (I’m talking to you, Gordon Jacob, and you, Edward Elgar). The Planets, along with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, had been grating on me more and more with each passing year of being a musician. Playing The Planets with three orchestras within a year, this time as clarinet two in the Modesto Symphony, made me realize that if I played it one more time, I would go on a rampage and hurt people with my clarinets. I needed a plan B, and coffee was all I could imagine.

But just as he had made merry music with his clarinet at Stonyhurst while under suspension,