Clarinet Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Clarinet. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?
Jandy Nelson (The Sky Is Everywhere)
Members of your family might say they are working hard all day long, while you are off at school or clarinet lessons, but the only way to know this for sure is to follow them at a discreet distance.
Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)
I turned to the clarinets. They were a resourceful lot.
Jennifer Echols (Major Crush)
Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.
Ambrose Bierce
Hey, hot cheeks!" A hand smacked my ass and I shrieked. Spinning around, I glared at Dan Ottoman, a blond, pimply, clarinet player from band. He leered back at me and winked. "Never took you for a player, girl," he said, trying to ooze charm but reminding me of a dirty Kermit the Frog. "Come down to band sometime. I've got a flute you can play
Julie Kagawa (The Iron King (The Iron Fey, #1))
And then yesterday…” He tosses the clarinet onto the bed. “Found out you belong to me.” He points at me. “I own your ass
Jandy Nelson (The Sky Is Everywhere)
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
Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
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.
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
She's alone, they kept telling themselves, and surely she danced in no one's arms, yet somehow that seemed to matter less and less. As the night went on, and clarinet and coyote call mingled beyond the lantern light, the magic of their own powder-blue jackets and orchids seemed to fade, and it came to them in small sensations that they were more alone than she was.
Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl (Stargirl, #1))
I’m crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible-like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out.
Toni Morrison (Jazz)
Everybody will die, of course, sooner or later. Circus performers will die, and clarinet experts will die, and you and I will die, and there might be a person who lives on your block, right now, who is not looking both ways before he crosses the street and who will die in just in a few seconds, all because of a bus. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.
Lemony Snicket (The Austere Academy (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #5))
Her father had been forced to cancel her clarinet lessons after the neighbors complained about the practicing.
Jeanne Birdsall (The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (The Penderwicks, #1))
What's the point in worrying about the future? Who says there will even be a future? What happens if you die tomorrow and all you ever did was sit in maths classes and play the clarinet and moan about your family? What good is the future to you then?
Dawn O'Porter (Paper Aeroplanes (Paper Aeroplanes, #1))
Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.
Zadie Smith (Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays)
My soul is like a pawn shop. I mean it's filled with unredeemed pleasures, old clarinets, and cameras, and motheaten fur.
Saul Bellow (Henderson the Rain King)
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.
Khushwant Singh (Train to Pakistan)
He was young and tall, his hair was the color of fresh corn, his fingers were as thick as cigars, and he had his clarinet with him.
Peter Baida
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.
Jandy Nelson (The Sky Is Everywhere)
So for all that we might speak words in each other's vicinity, this could never develop into anything that could be called a conversation. It was as though we were speaking in different languages. If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one's engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.
Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow head scarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and clears its throat waiting for the woman to decide on the key. She makes up her mind and as you pass by informs your back that she is daddy's little angel child. The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own.
Toni Morrison (Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2))
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
I'm quickly approaching the moment of discovery: of myself by myself, which was something I knew all along and yet didn't know; and the discovery by poor half-blind Dr. Philobosian of what he'd failed to notice at my birth and continued to miss during every annual physical thereafter; and the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they'd given birth to (answer: the same child, only different); and finally, the discovery of the mutated gene that had lain buried in our bloodline for two hundred and fifty years, biding its time, waiting for Ataturk to attack, for Hajienestis to turn into glass, for a clarinet to play seductively out a back window, until, comint together with its recessive twin, it started the chain of events that led to me, here, writing in Berlin.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
In the afternoon the ship's company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the asthmatic meodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled the Star Spangled Banner, the choir chased it to cover, and George came in with a peculiarly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered it. Nobody mourned. We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not intentional and I do not endorse it).
Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad)
Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.
Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet)
I called Monsieur Menicucci, and he asked anxiously about my pipes. I told him they were holding up well. "That pleases me," he said, "because it is minus five degrees, the roads are perilous, and I am fifty-eight years old. I am staying at home." He paused, then added, "I shall play the clarinet.
Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence)
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.
Frances Hardinge (Cuckoo Song)
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'.
Gavin Extence
If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one’s engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.
Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
[Analysis] has helped, but not as much as I've wanted. Years ago, I remember, I brought my clarinet into the repair shop, and the guy took two weeks and put new pads on and everything. When I went in, I said, 'Thank you, but am I going to sound better?' And he said, 'Yes, you will sound better, but not as much as you'd like to.
Woody Allen
The low-tone clarinet moans. The door upstairs opens again. Stella slips down the rickety stairs in her robe. Her eyes are glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders. They stare at each other. Then they come together with low, animal moans. He falls to his knees on the steps and presses his face to her belly, curving a little with maternity. Her eyes go blind with tenderness as she catches his head and raises him level with her. He snatches the screen door open and lifts her off her feet and bears her into the dark flat.
Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire)
Or, if he’s feeling more poetic, it might be “Now, Frobisher, the clarinet is the concubine, the violas are yew trees in the cemetery, the clavichord is the moon, so … let the east wind blow that A minor chord, sixteenth bar onwards.
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Then I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets - without cases, mouthpieces, or bells. Life is like that sometimes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Jailbird)
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.
Pete Townshend
Cinta tak menafikan dan menghapuskan batas dan jarak di antara kalian. Batas dan jarak itu tetap ada. Namun batas itu tidak membelenggu dan jarak itu tidak memisahkan kalian. Elaborasinya serupa orkestra yang tercipta dari gabungan berbagai alat musik. Ada instrumen gesek; biola, viola, cello dan kontra bass. Alat musik tiup; flute, oboe, clarinet, dan bassoon. Alat musik petik; gitar, harpa, ukulele, kecapi. Alat musik perkusi; drum, piano, marimba, timpani. Namun demikian, gabungan dari semua instrumen yang berbeda beda itu bisa membentuk sebuah orkes simfoni yang indah, karena mereka tidak bermain sendiri sendiri. Mereka menyelaraskan bunyi dan nada dalam sebuah kesatuan harmoni yang padu, merdu, indah dan menyentuh hati.
Titon Rahmawan
I’m so far gone now, sometimes I feel like maybe it’s almost enough. Because, honestly, there isn’t the slightest trace left of that frizzy-haired, freckle-faced, clarinet-playing, scared-silent little girl. And her big secret is really not such a huge deal anymore. It was all so long ago now, it practically never even happened.
Amber Smith (The Way I Used to Be (The Way I Used to Be, #1))
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.
Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence)
Gustav Carver is Tonton Clarinette.
Nick Stone (Mr. Clarinet (Max Mingus #1))
Her voice was warm and husky as a clarinet, but not so sad as a clarinet: friendlier. When she laughed, it was like a clarinet blowing bubbles.
Katherine Catmull (The Radiant Road)
Every clarinet has its own particular bag of tricks, which must be exploited and explored.
Jack Brymer (Clarinet (Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides))
One nice thing about my momma is, she never gets on you for what you are not doing. I mean, she never looks away from the things you do only to notice what isn't on the plan. This is the most important thing in getting along with...anybody, and I can tell you because I copy it from her and it makes good sense. You don't go looking at the things people don't do, when they already be doing plenty in other areas. If your son collects stamps, why you want to go fussing at him because he doesn't play the clarinet? Check out his stamps, man.
Bruce Brooks (The Moves Make the Man)
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.
Pete Townshend (Who I Am)
Max walked back to Beeson, sidestepping a slalom path of dog turds leading into the kitchen. He’d narrowly missed standing in a tepee of turds that looked too deliberately arranged to be natural.
Nick Stone (Mr. Clarinet (Max Mingus #1))
Everybody will die, of course, sooner or later. Circus performers will die, and clarinet experts will die, and you and I will die, and there might be a person who lives on your block, right now, who is not looking both ways before he crosses the street and who will die in just a few seconds, all because of a bus. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact. The
Lemony Snicket (The Austere Academy (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #5))
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.
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
When they were all ready, Halpern again counted them in, and the lyrical clarinet line floated over the strings and, Max felt, out of the open window and on, out and out over the hot, dusty July city like summer rain.
Lucy Beckett (A Postcard from the Volcano: A Novel of Pre-War Germany)
You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger's curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud.
Toni Morrison (God Help the Child)
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.
Dean Koontz (The Neighbor (The City, #0.5))
I came to that wooden marching band. I stopped and looked. There was a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and drum. Birds don't live alone, I told myself. They live in flocks. Like people. People are always in a group. Like that little wooden band.
Paul Fleischman (Whirligig)
After sex, they would often lie in bed listening to the record. She never tired of it. “Armstrong’s trumpet and singing are absolutely wonderful, of course, but if you ask me, the thing you should concentrate on is Barney Bigard’s clarinet,” she would say. Yet
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (Vintage International))
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.
Paul Fleischman (Whirligig)
The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching.
Paul Fleischman (Whirligig)
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.
Amos Oz (Panther In The Basement (A Vintage original))
Downstairs, entertaining company, Desdemona heard her son’s clarinet and, as if orchestrating a harmony, let out a long sigh. For the last forty-five minutes Gus and Georgia Vasilakis and their daughter Gaia had been sitting in the living room. It was Sunday afternoon. On the coffee table a dish of rose jelly reflected light from the sparkling glasses of wine the adults were drinking. Gaia nursed a glass of lukewarm Vernor’s ginger ale. An open tin of butter cookies sat on the table.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
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.
Langston Hughes (The Big Sea (American Century Series))
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.
Anne Tyler (Clock Dance)
Surely an instrument is neither male nor female—they’re just things that make sound—strings and bows, brass and wood, mallets and cymbals and drumskins and little metal triangles. And yet all you have to do is look around at these musicians to see the way that even sound is gendered. In the middle of the orchestra is the brass section—tubas, trombones, trumpets, French horn, every last one of them played by boys. It’s not all that different in the woodwinds—where the boys play bassoons and clarinets, but all the flutes are played by girls. The strings are even more ridiculous—the deeper the instrument, the more likely it is to be played by a boy. So all the basses? Boys. Most of the cellos? Boys. The violas split half and half. All but one of the violins? Girls. Then there’s the harp, which I guess federal law requires be played by a girl. And the percussion and kettle drums, which are usually played by boys. How weird is this? Most of us decided to play our instruments in third grade, a bunch of little kids who made our choices without even thinking about them. But even at eight years old, we were already running the gender maze that the world had set for us, without even realizing it.
Jodi Picoult (Mad Honey)
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
the streets. So now everyone is afraid of it. Petr GINZ Today it’s clear to everyone who is a Jew and who’s an Aryan, because you’ll know Jews near and far by their black and yellow star. And Jews who are so demarcated must live according to the rules dictated: Always, after eight o’clock, be at home and click the lock; work only labouring with pick or hoe, and do not listen to the radio. You’re not allowed to own a mutt; barbers can’t give your hair a cut; a female Jew who once was rich can’t have a dog, even a bitch, she cannot send her kids to school must shop from three to five since that’s the rule. She can’t have bracelets, garlic, wine, or go to the theatre, out to dine; she can’t have cars or a gramophone, fur coats or skis or a telephone; she can’t eat onions, pork, or cheese, have instruments, or matrices; she cannot own a clarinet or keep a canary for a pet, rent bicycles or barometers, have woollen socks or warm sweaters. And especially the outcast Jew must give up all habits he knew: he can’t buy clothes, can’t buy a shoe, since dressing well is not his due; he can’t have poultry, shaving soap, or jam or anything to smoke; can’t get a license, buy some gin, read magazines, a news bulletin, buy sweets or a machine to sew; to fields or shops he cannot go even to buy a single pair of winter woollen underwear, or a sardine or a ripe pear. And if this list is not complete there’s more, so you should be discreet; don’t buy a thing; accept defeat. Walk everywhere you want to go in rain or sleet or hail or snow. Don’t leave your house, don’t push a pram, don’t take a bus or train or tram; you’re not allowed on a fast train; don’t hail a taxi, or complain; no matter how thirsty you are you must not enter any bar; the riverbank is not for you, or a museum or park or zoo or swimming pool or stadium or post office or department store, or church, casino, or cathedral or any public urinal. And you be careful not to use main streets, and keep off avenues! And if you want to breathe some air go to God’s garden and walk there among the graves in the cemetery because no park to you is free. And if you are a clever Jew you’ll close off bank accounts and you will give up other habits too like meeting Aryans you knew. He used to be allowed a swag, suitcase, rucksack, or carpetbag. Now he has lost even those rights but every Jew lowers his sights and follows all the rules he’s got and doesn’t care one little jot.
Petr Ginz (The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941–1942)
Jolly Marchers by Maisie Aletha Smikle Dam Dam Didley Doe Dee Daw Didley Doe Dee Dam Doe Fa So La Ti Doe Animals in a row Prancing as they go Jiggling and Wiggling Tails and head bobbing Mice on drums Elephants on flute Zebras blare the trumpets Squirrels blow trombones Skunks get funky on clarinets Bees on violins Hogs on guitar Parrots and crickets sing Aha Aha Vultures cheer Mosquitoes twirl Wings clapping and flapping Heads go up and down bobbing Marching and skanking Rocking and bobbing Wiggling and singing Dee Daw Didley Doe This is not a circus There are no clowns There is not a palace There are no crowns On and on they go Monkeys in tow Tigers in bow Onlookers stare and glow Donkey takes the podium As conductor of the band Waving his marching wand The band comes to a stand Mule takes a stool And sits in the cool They have reached the bend Where the march ends The ants were nesting So they missed the fest Some got on tambourines And insist they must join in The ants jiggle and wiggle Some play the fiddle Dancing and singing Didley Dam Didley Doe
Maisie Aletha Smikle
Oh, the drums, of course,” Jase says. “It was the clarinet, but then he realized that was just not a turn-on.
Anonymous
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.
Anonymous
JULY 20. I've just walked into the opera house. I have no programme. Strange new players are premiering a piece by a flamboyant new composer. Front and centre, three, maybe four, whales begin — a swelling string section — discordant, irresolute harmonies fill the concert hall. Then two more whales, stage right, come in, playing eight octave clarinets, counterpointing the string section. And then they, too, are counterpointed by occasional glissando slurs and passages played pizzicato by whales at the rear of the stage. But suddenly, a programme change: The orchestra members switch clothes and pull new instruments from their cases. The French horn players begin wailing on shiny, sleazy saxophones. The trumpeters spit rapid-fire bursts into an underwater echo chamber — the deep, rocky corridor of Johnstone Strait.
Erich Hoyt (Orca: The Whale Called Killer)
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.
James Freeman (The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes)
Mari nods. The record ends, the automatic turntable lifts the needle, and the tone arm drops onto its rest. The bartender approaches the player to change records. He carefully lifts the platter and slips it into its jacket. Then he takes out the next record, examines its surface under a light, and sets it on the turntable. He presses a button and the needle descends to the record. Faint scratching. Then Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” begins to play. Harry Carney’s languorous bass clarinet performs solo. The bartender’s unhurried movements give the place its own special time flow.
Anonymous
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.
Karen Marie Moning (Burned (Fever, #7))
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.
Karen Marie Moning (Burned (Fever, #7))
If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one’s engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been a touch more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.
Anonymous
Los directores de este tipo gritaban y maldecían a las orquestas, montaban escenas, amenazaban con despedir al clarinete principal por llegar tarde. Y la orquesta, obligada a aguantarlo, replicaba contando cosas a espaldas del director, historias que lo definían como un "auténtico personaje". Después llegaban a creer lo que creía este emperador de la batuta: que sólo tocaban bien porque los estaban azotando. Se apelotonaban en un rebaño masoquista, de vez en cuando soltaban un comentario irónico entre sí, pero esencialmente admiraban a su guía por su nobleza y su idealismo, por la meta que se había propuesto y su capacidad de visión, más amplia que la de quienes se limitaban a raspar y soplar delante de sus atriles. Por muy áspero que pudiese ser por necesidad cada cierto tiempo, el maestro era un gran dirigente al que debían seguir. Ahora, ¿quién continuaría negando que una orquesta era un microcosmos de la sociedad?
Julian Barnes (The Noise of Time)
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
John Sinclair (The Phoenix Song)
My dad is not one to sue. He makes hummingbird nectar by the pitcher in the fridge and refills the feeders every weekend. Whenever I said the word "hate" growing up, he said, "Be careful, hate's a powerful word." He's the one who will clap for the man playing clarinet in the street. Summer afternoons he cooks risotto while singing along to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. But I heard a new register of rage in his voice, like he would tear the whole place down if I just said the word.
Chanel Miller (Know My Name)
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.
Flea (Acid for the Children: A Memoir)
The evening started off with the dropping of the L at our friend Skood’s house, where he, Anthony, and I had sat in amazement, deeply expanding our consciousness, listening to Eric Dolphy’s solo bass clarinet version of “God Bless the Child” over and over again for hours, its inventive and fearless power rewiring our brains with the best possible upgrade, teaching us things that I’d be deciphering for the rest of my life.
Flea (Acid for the Children: A Memoir)
In the hands of the untalented, a clarinet is a lethal weapon. There are states that allow the sale of automatic assault weapons but ban the use of clarinets at school concerts. If played poorly, they are the sonic equivalent of Hurricane Katrina.
Ian Morgan Cron (Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir . . . of Sorts)
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.
Hermann Hesse (Herman Hesse Three Essays)
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.
D.B.C. Pierre (Vernon God Little)
Then we went into “Nobody’s Fault.” This was one of the highlights of my creative career. If you listen really close to the front of “Nobody’s Fault,” there isn’t an intro to the song. I suggested to Joe that he turn his amp volume to 12 and the volume on his guitar off. Since the key of the song was an E, I suggested he start by fingering a D chord, and then turn the volume knob all the way up slowly. I told Brad to play an A chord, same dealio as Joe. Then Joe played a C, did the same thing—Brad played a G, Joe played a B-flat, Brad played an F, Joe played an A-flat, Brad played an E-flat, and then Joe and Brad both played a D chord. And when they played that D together, rolling the volume knob up with their pinkies—and holding it for a second—then the band came in on a crashing E chord like Hitler was at the door. I looked over and Jack Douglas was internally hemorrhaging with bliss. I was in the middle of the room with my headphones on (which we called “cans”) and a live mic in front of me, because I loved singing live vocals as the band tracked. It always seemed to incite a little riot inside of everyone. Right before the band came in on the downbeat, the union engineer from Columbia marked his presence for all time by opening the door right in the middle of that sweet silence. He had a clarinet in his hand that wound up on the front of “Pandora’s Box,” but that’s another story. You can actually hear the door opening in “Nobody’s Fault” to this day and it somehow seems to get louder and louder with each play, only ’cause you know it’s there now.
Steven Tyler (Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir)
To dial up was like watching a rocket launch: first the top light was on, then the second . . . then came the sound of the modem talking to whatever it was talking to . . . sounding like an Atari game’s parody of birdsong or of a clarinet solo, pinging and ponging as more and more of the little lights came on, blinking and then steady, orange and then green . . . the sound building to a crescendo that recalled the noise of TV static, as machines confided who-knows-what secret binary handshakes between them while I listened. Then came a key change. Then the pitch of the static pulse tweaked, now higher, now lower, and then, gloriously, the final light went to green and I was online, in orbit: cyberspace.
Pete Buttigieg (Trust: America's Best Chance)
Lembrei de Dona Cícera, da Paraíba… A conheci chegando da escola: mochila nas costas, baixinha, falante com seus 60 anos e cuidando da filha que estava com câncer. Viúva do prefeito de uma cidadezinha no sertão, resolveu terminar o ensino médio para fazer faculdade de Serviço Social para ajudar as pessoas… Tocava “pratos” na banda da Igreja, mas como era muito pesado estava aprendendo clarinete. Me confessou: — A Matemática está esquentando meu juízo! Preciso de reforço para poder passar no vestibular. E ao perguntar de onde vinha tanta energia, me disse sem titubear: — É porque começo o dia tomando café com Jesus! Às 5 horas da manhã…
Zoé Avillez (Aceita um chá?: Uma conversa entre amigas (Portuguese Edition))
Extra fingerings for each note are like synonyms in a language. Know as many as you can.
Robert Willaman (The Clarinet and Clarinet Playing)
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.
Jack Brymer (Clarinet (Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides))
The clarinet in its most perfect form is a strange beast--if it is imperfect, it is also completely untamable.
Jack Brymer (Clarinet (Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides))
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!
Michael Bracewell (Re-make/Re-model: Art, Pop, Fashion and the making of Roxy Music, 1953-1972)
Eton, for all its virtues, seriously lacked girls. (Well, apart from the kitchen girls who we camped out on the roof waiting for night after night.) But beyond that, and the occasional foxy daughter of a teacher, it was a desert. (Talking of foxy daughters, I did desperately fancy the beautiful Lela, who was the daughter of the clarinet teacher. But she ended up marrying one of my best friends from Eton, Tom Amies--and everyone was very envious. Great couple. Anyway, we digress.) As I said, apart from that…it was a desert. All of us wrote to random girls whom we vaguely knew or had maybe met once, but if we were honest, it was all in never-never land. I did meet one quite nice girl who I discovered went to school relatively nearby to Eton. (Well, about thirty miles nearby, that is.) I borrowed a friend’s very old, single-geared, rusty bicycle and headed off one Sunday afternoon to meet this girl. It took me hours and hours to find the school, and the bike became steadily more and more of an epic to ride, not only in terms of steering but also just to pedal, as the rust cogs creaked and ground. But finally I reached the school gates, pouring with sweat. It was a convent school, I found out, run entirely by nuns. Well, at least they should be quite mild-natured and easy to give the slip to, I thought. That was my first mistake. I met the girl as prearranged, and we wandered off down a pretty, country path through the local woods. I was just summoning up the courage to make a move when I heard this whistle, followed by this shriek, from somewhere behind us. I turned to see a nun with an Alsatian, running toward us, shouting. The young girl gave me a look of terror and pleaded with me to run for my life--which I duly did. I managed to escape and had another monster cycle ride back to school, thinking: Flipping Nora, this girl business is proving harder work than I first imagined. But I persevered.
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
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.
Nicholas Christopher (The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen)
Romantic retrospect aside, the night spent in the truck is distinctly unpleasant. We are cramped and cold. The much-vaunted heating of the truck is ineffectual. The wind prises through the cracks in the sides of the windows, and penetrates us to the bone. My feet are moist in my shoes, yet to take my socks off is to chill my feet even further. We take every warm item of clothing out of our bags and swaddle ourselves into immobility. The sheepskin on the seat cuts out a bit of the cold rising from below. We share a blanket and Sui, before he goes off to sleep, makes sure I get a generous part of this. He then drops off to sleep, and tugs it away. He jockeys for space, and I am forced to lean forward. He begins to snore. To make it all worse, both he and Gyanseng sleeptalk. They have told me before tat I do, too, but I've never noticed it. What I do notice, however, late at night, with my two territorially acquisitive companions wedging me forwards, is that I have started talking to myself: naming the constellations I can see move across the mud-stained windscreen, interviewing myself, reciting odd snatches of poetry. I also notice that I am hungry, which is curious, because during the day I was not; and itchy, which is to be expected after so much unwashed travel; and sleepy, though I cannot sleep for cold and headache and discomfort; and alas, bored out of my mind. When things get really bad, I imagine myself in a darkened room, up to my shoulders in a tub of hot water, with a glass of Grand Marnier beside me and the second movement of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet sounding gently in my ears. This voluptuous vision, rather than making my present condition seem even more insupportable, actually enables me to escape for a while from the complaints of my suffering body.
Vikram Seth (From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet)
Heath holds the door to the band room open for me, and I get to my chair without falling, snapping together my clarinet and trying to reclaim the steps of this day, the ones that need to accumulate to get me through the week, the month, the year. Everything that needs to pass to land me where I deserve to be - the first clarinet chair in a bigger room than this, surrounded by real musicians. Isaac Harver is not going to distract me from that. And if my heart stops first, I'll find a way to keep going without it.
Mindy McGinnis (This Darkness Mine)
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.
Dale Curran (Dupree Blues)
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.
Megan Woller (From Camelot to Spamalot: Musical Retellings of Arthurian Legend on Stage and Screen)
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.
Joe Heap (When the Music Stops)
Fisher has always hated clowns. From childhood, he’d found them smug and unfunny, and it makes perfect sense that he’s always disliked this movement, because “Jupiter” is, essentially, the soundtrack to a massive clown orgy. Oh ho-ho, say the violins, aren’t you a naughty jester! What, chirp the clarinets, you want to put that pie where?
Kate Racculia (Bellweather Rhapsody)
Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Thus I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets—without cases, mouthpieces, or bells. Life is like that sometimes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Jailbird)
Valentina Diaz, a daughter of Aphrodite, did her best to throttle a clarinet, producing sounds like a basset hound whimpering in a thunderstorm.
Rick Riordan (The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo, #1))
I'm crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is a shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things.
Toni Morrison (Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2))
Generally speaking, saxophones are either taller versions of the clarinet weirdos, or heartbreakers, or both.
Anna Meriano (It Sounds Like This)
You said yourself that I seemed happy,” I tell her. “But why are you?” It’s a good question. How can I be happy when the clasp on my clarinet case actually creaks from lack of use? How can I be happy when I flubbed a basic scale this week in band, my fingers correcting automatically, but not before Charity’s eyes made a quick dash in my direction, noting the mistake? How can I be happy when my boyfriend and my lover are two different people? “Because I’m two different people,” I say, answering myself aloud, feeling the jigsaw of my new life click together. I’m a puzzle, definitely. But not the kind that lies flat on the table waiting for someone to piece it together. My broken bits have flurried through the air of their own volition, creating in three dimensions. And I don’t need finishing.
Mindy McGinnis (This Darkness Mine)
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.
Mindy McGinnis (This Darkness Mine)
(What is it with ghosts who play the organ? We’re waiting for one to pick up the clarinet.)
Lisa Kröger (Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction)
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.
Khushwant Singh (Train to Pakistan)
They had grown up with a constant stream of global warming and gun violence burbling on low from their parents’ radios as they were driven to and from soccer or clarinet. Their lives, for the most part (at least the majority of students who attended this liberal and very expensive college), were cloaked in the postmillennial blanket of peace and prosperity, while terrible threats loomed in the shadowy corners of the larger world. They were overpraised and overpressured. There were teenage billionaires, twelve-year-old YouTube stars, and no jobs for them once they graduated. Once Trump became president, the illusion, the one imparted to them comfortably from the driver’s seat of a minivan, the idea that the world would slowly get better, that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” was upended.
Julia May Jonas (Vladimir)
Despite his late and haphazard start, Cecchini also became a renowned teacher of both jazz and classical guitar. Students traveled from out of state to pick his brain, and by the early 1980s lines formed down the stairs of his Chicago school in the evenings. His own formal training, of course, had been those free clarinet lessons. “I’d say I’m 98 percent self-taught,” he told me. He switched between instruments and found his way through trial and error. It might sound unusual, but when Cecchini reeled off legends he played with or admired, there was not a Tiger among them.
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)