Yes indeed. Still working out various nooks and crannies of it and of the ongoing task of transferring files from a hard disc with all the old gear on.

Which I suppose is only on-topic insofar as it does rather push back my inevitable acquisition of some of my own favourite instruments. Guntram Wolf's copy of the Kress great-bass chalumeau, for example. Or a nice baroque D clarinet so I can annoy the neighbours with some Molter.

I did have a brief tootle on a Tubax a little while ago - not at the Frankfurt Musikmesse but in Karlsruhe (speaking of Molter...) where I was doing a little Rihm trio with Gérard Buquet and Marcus Weiss. They're beautiful things - since the bore is much narrower than normal on the big saxes they're much more subtle. Even as an appallingly dreadful sax player I was able to get something resembling music out of it within minutes.

If things go to plan I'm going to have the Eppelsheim contrabass clarinet prototype for a few performances later this year - hopefully for a little while in July and very probably for a solo gig in Berlin in September and then some ensemble playing in early October. That's another very fine instrument indeed.

I don't dislike any instruments really. If I could have six favourites I'd say the oboe, marimba, double bass, harpsichord, flute and accordion. Any less than that is hard to say, and it'd be too easy to include several more!

The contrabass clarinet could be heard in The Avengers episode shown today - during the last five minutes in the last scene, the traditional light-heated one where Steed and Peel meet after another successful mission. The CB clarinet starts a jaunty tune played by a flute; it continues throughout the scene and finishes it.

And the good news is that this episode is being repeated tomorrow on BBC4 at 11.50pm!

Jonathan, you might therefore be interested in this CD (if you don't have it already), released by Bridge a couple of months ago, "Clara Rockmore's Lost Theremin Album", none of which has been released before.

http://www.bridgerecords.com/pages/catalog/9208.htm

Like Rockmore's other recorded output, it consists principally of arrangements of "popular classics".

Presumably you could do "double stopping" as it were, by ensuring air went down both tubes?  And with multiphonics you could get some interesting chords.........

But why not just have a single tube, with semitone holes on the front, and quarter tone holes on the back? (and split keys to operate them?)

Tommo

Thanks Richard, I had heard about it and thought I may buy it at some point.  I'd also like to try adn play one and they aren't expensive.  Trouble is, I think 1 instrument is enough for me!

Ollie,

To avoid condensation through the quarter tone holes you could have them down the side i suppose (but then I guess the key mechanisms would get in the way....)  And it does seem a bit pointless if you can already do most of the quarter tones with a fingering.

On the aulochrome, a double mouthpiece eh?  As a player, what would you rather....?  Single or double?

Tommo

Ah, but with extra keys on the same tube one could do other things with them; when the clarinet (and the chalumeau!) was set up to play diatonically it could already play chromatically at a pinch, then when it was set up to play chromatically quarter-tone fingerings were possible. So as people have already discovered with newer models of flute, keys set up for quarter-tones make possible not only even smaller intervals but newer possibilities for things like microtones.