Phase 2!

Let the reading begin!

We’re starting the new year with rehearsals to bring the first wave of arrangements into the light. How fun is that?

Time spent getting my C in tune was well spent. And interestingly, this little beast can get some volume. I’ve decided to let it hold its own with arrangements for clarinet and piano to start. We’ll add the other toys later.

Testing the Acoustics

Relatively early in the process, I decided to give my friends a little Christmas gift and play a tanda of fresh arrangements. I wanted to get a feel for the hall acoustics with solo clarinet and dancers. More specifically, would the sound need to be amplified or not? Fun fact: Clarinet as a symphony instrument is designed to carry through a full orchestra in very large halls. So no problem with that at all! No amp needed by a long shot.

Since then, I’ve taken opportunities to play with tango bands to get a feel for intonation and balance. Again, as these are the cornerstones of orchestral training, adjusting to bandoneons instead of trombones & cellos (insert another viola joke here) isn’t a stretch at all, and is, in fact, delightfully fun.

SO much fun!

A New (Old) C-Clarinet

As arranging started to get underway, I quickly realized that working with a B-flat clarinet was going to become cumbersome. For reasons only they know, tango musicians preferred sharp keys, and by the time I would add two more sharps for the Bb parts, I kept running into passages that bordered on impossible. So I could either keep the arrangements on the less-virtuosic end, OR I could look into a good C clarinet. The former wasn’t of much interest to me, because what’s the point? But C clarinets are notoriously not-very-good. (I’ve looked at Cs over the years, but was never happy with the new ones enough to buy one). So as I was pondering these things, I started to browse eBay instrument sales to see what was out there for vintage-era models. Not much, fyi.

But randomly at 11:30 one night, I stumbled on an international listing for this particular C. I agonized for 28 minutes and made a definitive decision. (International instrument sales are final, so good luck to you)! I placed my very-thought-out low bid and drove home to get to sleep. By the time I got home, my bid to somewhere in Switzerland was accepted and New Old Squeaky was shipped out the next morning. I tracked its shipping journey online like a crazy person.

Because I’m a nerd and know clarinet serial numbers and the right questions to ask, and because some guy in Switzerland happened to be reputable, AND Buffet Clarinet Company knew what they were doing with Cs in 1979, I have an amazing little horn. I don’t know much about its history other than the year it was made and the amount of wear on the keys, but it’s now a fabulous tango horn. Anyway, I got it a full high-level overhaul, a new barrel (that’s a story in itself that I won’t inflict on the non-nerds), and off to the races.

A fringe benefit is that I can also easily read off of any band’s arrangements or lead sheets and fill in whatever they need: Vocal lines, violin lines, or bandoneon lines. (Except viola clef. No one should be including them anyway).

So… have C, will travel!

Pimping up the Space

I talk about our art and rehearsal space in another post, and since the beginning of our takeover of a very beautiful historic building in Downtown Stafford Springs, I’ve periodically hosted music here over the last nine years. As this tango idea began to formulate, and I also because the host of a used, hoisted piano, I decided to dedicate more of the main floor of my shop for rehearsals and chamber events.

There isn’t enough room to dance tango here, but the more I think about it, we DO have a beautiful park with a fire pit across the street, and while it’s not quite Central Park Tango, I can see a summer Stafford Fire Pit Tango happening. It’s something to think about.

In the meantime, I put far more time and money than I intended to get Mme Free Piano repaired, wheeled, and tuned than I’d like to admit, but she is one fine looking piece of character, and now a member of our band.

Editing Begins

Sometime around May 2023, I clicked on some targeted marketing for a score-sharing site while I was looking for a copy of the piano part to the first song I’d been thinking of arranging. You know, for the last sixteen years. While I didn’t find the song from that click, what I did discover was the next generation of music editing software.

As I poked around the program, I found it to be very intuitive, in a way that the old (and we’re talking old) music notation software was not. I started entering the basic structure of this particular song and began editing. Additional searching led to large caches of original tango lead sheet PDFs.

It was summer, and I had the time and energy to finally start to actualize this relentlessly persistent project idea.

The song was Milonga de Mis Amores (still today my favorite milonga), the first of many.

Why Clarinet?

In its prime, as the Europeans brought the things into Argentina along with their little accordions and whatever else made a fun noise, clarinets fit right into tango. Why wouldn’t they? Lyrical, articulable, and packable! It’s fun to hear them in the old recordings. Sadly, clarinet is NOT an easy instrument to record (it has an unusual sound wave that until recently was hard to get right), so they usually sound like some guy with no teeth is honking away. (Which is also why, to date, I have no recordings on this site: I haven’t been interested in investing the time and money for the recording setup I need to get a true representation of my sound. I will eventually, but honestly, I just want to spread the joy live at this point.)

In the last decade or so, a handful of modern clarinetists have been recording, and you go, my friends! I’ve heard some great klezmer versions, and some beautiful virtuositic work.

For me, I’m drawn to three main elements of tango. The first two are unique to the sound and style of the bandoneon. Bandoneon is a reed instrument (I just looked up a diagram for you, but for God’s sake, Teri, not everyone is that much of a nerd) and as such, has a very similar sound to other reed instruments like clarinet and organ. But the bando has added the performance style of staccato into its bag (bellows?) of tricks, and THAT is like waving candy in front of a toddler for me. So it has the sound of a clarinet with the nuance of articulation.

The third element of tango is certainly used by the bandoneons, but also the violins and vocalists, and that is the deep, rich melodic lines. The songs of love, the songs of despair, the songs of the Porteño. Baby, we can sing too! Clarinet ranges three and a half octaves, and I can sing of despair from bottom to top.