I reckon it's just the sort of instrument to tempt Sir John Tavener.

[I'll get me coat.]

WARNING - FOR ANORAKS ONLY

I've been poking around in various places in search of chalumeau enlightenment. I won't post all the boring facts I've come across but I must note that the conclusions I had come to about double holes were quite erroneous.

Quite a few replica chalumeaus have double holes for fingers 3, 4, 6 and 7 - not just the Moeck ones but the ones made by Guntram Wolf that Christian Leitherer plays as well as the ones pictured on Andreas Schöni's website. But none of the surviving historical chalumeaus have double holes anywhere but the lowest hole and some don't even have that. So Telemann's chromatic writing would appear indeed to have been a matter for cross-fingerings and perhaps some half-holing.

Only seven instruments which are reasonably definitely chalumeaus have survived, by the way. They're listed in the first chapter of Albert Rice's excellent book The Baroque Clarinet along with a number of doubtful cases.

The furthest I will take this thread into anorak-land is to note that Jacob Denner's invoices include only three sizes of chalumeau which he calls Primieur, Second/Alt and Chalimou-Basson. The difference in price between the second and third is rather large, which suggests that perhaps the third instrument isn't the instrument the size of a tenor recorder that's usually used in the recordings of the Graupner pieces involving three chalumeaus but something rather bigger. Perhaps indeed the Kress bassoon-shaped 'great-bass' chalumeau I mentioned a while back.

Oh, and I've found a maker who does the Kress-model chalumeau for about half the price of the one I've played. I wonder if it's a good instrument? I think I'll have to find out.

Moeck chalumeaus aren't all that expensive in fact - but there are plenty of similar instruments around. There used to be one which was called the 'red hot fountain pen'. And there are several instruments mainly intended for children which more or less fit the description.





This one's called a Xaphoon:

I do have a xaphoon somewhere but I don't think it's in Europe, unfortunately. I think it's a tenor sax reed that it takes. The mouthpiece shape feels very odd if you're used to clarinet/saxophone since it doesn't taper off nearly as much.

In other news I met a clarinettist today who's selling his chalumeaus. Made by Peter van der Poel (the chalumeaus not the clarinettist).



I'm a bit worried because he's also selling his Mozart basset and a pair of Lotzes, also by van der Poel,



and perhaps a 3-key Baroque clarinet by Agnès Guéroult. This could turn out expensive.

Tony, a chalumeau (or for that matter clarinet) sounds nearly an octave lower than a saxophone/recorder/flute of the same length. Cylindrical stopped-pipe acoustics, apparently...

They are indeed gorgeous although that's not everything that counts of course... (and the blue sheet helps a lot )

That's indeed the thing with a Stadler basset: it's good for two pieces from the repertoire, and that's going to be something on my mind when I go to try the instruments on Friday. Even the basset clarinet part in Parto, parto is for a basset in Bb. But of course one of the good things about being in the new music racket



is that you can always say yes, that's all the important music anyone's written for the instrument. Yet.

(Of course one of the disadvantages of the new music racket is that you usually don't have much cash because when you see a tempting instrument the argument 'well, what's anyone written for it?' has no effect whatsoever. Sometimes it's even a stimulus.)

It's true kitty (I mean, that they sound an octave lower): if you go down to 'shapes' here you'll see something on that phenomenon as it affects organs.