Marie Ross first wanted to be a classical musician as an 11-year-old when she heard the saxophone solo in Pictures at an Exhibition by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky.
But her youth orchestra didn't need a saxophonist so a teacher suggested she learn the clarinet instead, and Marie fell in love.
“I discovered you could do so much more in classical music with the clarinet … you can be beautiful or expressive, or angry or shrill, all these kind of different sounds.”
Marie grew up in the American state of Arkansas and became an internationally recognised concert performer, clinician of the clarinet and educator. She now lives in Auckland.
- Check out our For the love of clarinet audio collection
- Listen to Dr Marie Ross on RNZ Concert (Upbeat, April 2016)
- Listen to Marie Ross & Franklin Cohen (clarinet) and Kent Isomura (piano) play Felix Mendelssohn's Konzertstueck No.1 for Two Clarinets and Piano, Op 113 (Upbeat, March 2019)
The clarinet is remarkable for its versatility and it tends to dominate orchestral music nowadays, Marie says.
“Mozart was one of the ones, and Haydn who came before, they really started to use the clarinet as a solo instrument and that only just increased through the Romantic period.
“The clarinet really became one of the wind instruments of choice because it was so expressive, it also has a huge range … you can play a lot of octaves on it, unlike the oboe which has a small range … clarinet has a bit more than four octaves.”
That versatility allows for a player’s personality to seep into the performance, Ross says.
“With strings, I think you can say ‘so and so’ is the best player, that’s possible, but with wind, it’s so much up to your opinion. Maybe because it has to do with blowing breath into an instrument that it’s so different from player to player, they can both be great and [you can] like them both for different reasons.”
Marie fulfilled her dream to study modern clarinet performance under international soloist Jon Manasse at Australia's Eastman School of Music.
While Manasse was an intense teacher, Ross is thankful that his training enabled her to reach the level of professionalism she’s at today.
“Jon Manasse is really known for his gorgeous tone, his tone on the clarinet is really special and it’s like really no other player out there. That’s something I really wanted to learn from him, also his finger technique is really amazing, [and] the way he practices.
“[I learned] a lot of methods [for] when you are in an audition situation or performance situation. Focussing and always being able to play with as much consistency as possible, which is important. That’s the training, you really need to have when you’re going to be in such a profession.”
Listen to Marie Ross and Franklin Cohen (clarinet) and Kent Isomura (piano) play Konzertstueck No.1 for Two Clarinets and Piano, Op 113 by Felix Mendelssohn (Music Alive, March 2019)
That rare thing, a historical clarinettist
Marie's latest album includes tracks produced with an 1890s clarinet made by one of the most famous clarinet-makers of all time, she says.
“And the piano is an 1875 New York Steinway, which those were some of Brahm’s favourite pianos in the last decades of his life. And the cello is, of course, played with gut strings and not steel strings like we have today.”
“[The celloist] actually played in the old way with the cello between her knees and with a different bow and different bridge ... that made it much more expressive with the cello but much harder with the technique.”
When Marie was a freelance musician in Germany, she travelled all over Europe performing with different orchestras, including once with “one of the greatest singers alive today” Cecilia Bartoli.
Along the way, Ross has played in great opera houses such as the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and the Salzburg Festival.
“It’s exciting and also can be very nerve-wrecking be because you go somewhere and you’re playing with completely new people all the time, new conductors, and probably a piece you’ve played before, but you have no idea how it’s going to go, how these people are going to play, and a new team quite often.”
As one of only a handful of historical clarinettists in Europe at the time, Marie would often go and play for whichever orchestra called her up.
While they have the same repertoire as regular clarinettists, historical clarinet-players difference tend to play big pieces on a clarinet which suits the sound and era of the piece of music.
“There’s, of course, a few aspects of playing that we know they did [in the past eras] that today’s players choose not to do because we know it wouldn’t sound good to us … The time has changed and think about the world now compared to how it was for Vivaldi … we’re bound to have different tastes.
“We take the things that are exciting and alive and the really cool things about playing and we put our own spin on that, use our own imagination to bring that to life and to speak to people that are alive today.
“Historical performance gives you permission to do that and to maybe change the traditional way that we’re stuck in ... it puts us outside that box.”
Clarinets of the past
Marie brought in three of her historical clarinets – one original and two copies – to the RNZ studio to show and play for Wallace Chapman. It’s a small portion of her collection of around 70 clarinets.
Baroque Chalumeau:
The historic Chalumeau is quite small compared to today's clarinets, almost the size of a recorder with only two keys at the top.
“It's basically just a piece of wood with holes and mouthpiece”, Marie says.
The Chalumeau takes a bit more time to prep up for playing than the modern clarinet – a piece of string is used to tie the reed on.
“This is a modern-day copy of an instrument that was around during the Baroque Period. People don’t normally think of clarinet as a Baroque instrument but this is sort of predecessor.”
The Chalumeau, which has a limited tonal range, was used by composers like Georg Philipp Telemann and Antonio Vivaldi to create lyrical and birdsong-like melodies.
“They did have baroque clarinets at the time, too, and they took over but they were much bigger and louder, and they sounded sort of like the trumpet.”
Classical period clarinet:
Mozart and Haydn began to notice the unique and versatile features of the clarinet towards the end of the Baroque and the beginning of the Classical period, Marie says.
“There were these great players coming up for clarinet that made the composers realise ‘oh, this could a melodic instrument, as well’ and it could play actually gorgeous melodies and had this expressive capacity. So during the Classical period, the clarinet developed about five keys.”
Marie's clarinet has about 10 keys and would’ve been used to play the music of Schubert, Mendelssohn and Rossini in the late Classical period.
It is a normal-sized clarinet made with natural wood, and again uses a piece of string to tie on the reed.
“These clarinets are actually all very individual and made by one man by hand. If you get a modern clarinet today they’re all factory-made, but this is actually not, this is made by one man, all the keys and wood are cut by hand.”
The keys are quite simple, Ross says, made from sheets of brass with leather glued to the end.
“This would’ve been from about the 1820s, but you can still play pieces like Mozart on it. It has a few more keys than the real Mozart clarinet.”
The sound of this clarinet is intimate and delicate due to the fragile materials it’s made from, Marie says.
As a result, it produces lines that are quite short, rather than sustained.
E-Flat clarinet:
Marie’s 1840s clarinet has a higher pitch, producing quite shrill sounds.
It was used in military music before the 1840s, but Hector Berlioz was the first person to really incorporate it in orchestral music, she says.
The E-flat clarinet has a solo part in the last movement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.
It was used to evoke imagery of witches around a bubbling cauldron in a piece called 'Dream of a Witches Sabbath', Marie says.
“[Berlioz] uses the E-flat clarinet to show these witches basically in hell, and he takes the lover’s theme and makes it really grotesque for the E-flat clarinet.”
'Dream of a Witches Sabbath' reinforces the versatility of the clarinet to express sentiments other than beauty, Ross says.
