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ERIC HOEPRICH. The Clarinet. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. xx + 396pp., illus. ISBN 978-0-300-10282-6 (hardback). Price: £25
Yale's Musical Instrument Series continues with a volume entitled The Clarinet by Eric Hoeprich. Since the 1980s, Hoeprich has specialized in historically informed performance, as a player of the chalumeau, clarinet and basset horn. To this monograph, he brings his knowledge of repertoire, particularly from the chamber and orchestral literature. In addition, his considerable expertise as a maker is reflected in his account of the instrument's organological development.
The work is generously illustrated, offering materials from a variety of primary and secondary sources, although for readers less familiar with different clarinet mechanisms, providing slightly larger versions of photographs portraying two or more clarinets would have clarified those features peculiar to each instrument. Likewise, annotations, such as those in Kroll, would have supplemented illustrations of clarinet design features (cf Ill. 9.2, p.210), explicitly to show aspects often difficult to describe in words.1
Appendices list instrument makers and instructional materials. The former complements the information in Waterhouse's The New Langwill Index,2 including even persons crafting historicallyinformed copies of instruments by makers from the clarinet's more formative years. A list of clarinet methods and fingering charts provides a welcome addition to van Kalker's compilation.3
More assiduous proofreading would have eliminated the handful of errors/omissions in the Index and Bibliography. Theodor Verhey's wind quintet (Breitkopf, 1884) is in fact op. 20 (p. 199) and mention...