The clarinet in England

Abstract

As one of the authors of the article concerned, I feel I should respond to Albert Rice's claim (‘The clarinet in England during the 1760s’, EM, xxxiii/1 (Feb 2005), p.63, n.27) that ‘Contrary to the worklist in New Grove II, [Thomas] Arne did not use the clarinet in his cantata Love & Resentment’. In fact, in the compressed score of the first air of the work, ‘Why Damon, wilt thou strive in vain’, as published in Arne's collection Summer Amusement (London, 1766), pp.27–36, there are three indications for ‘Clar[ine]ts’ above a stave labelled at the outset ‘violins’. Arne seems to have intended the clarinets to combine and alternate with the violins. There are no other indications for them in the other two movements, though it would also make sense for them to play along with the violins in some of the passages of the last air, ‘No, no, for a thought so meanly base’. Incidentally, a quick look through The solo cantata in eighteenth-century Britain, a thematic catalog (Warren, MI, 2003) by Rice's namesake Paul F. Rice reveals only one extra work that probably comes within the scope of the article, Charles Dibdin's cantata ‘Oft I've implor'd the gods in vain’, published in 1770, though the clarinet is also called for in cantatas published in the 1770s by Thomas Arne (Diana, 1774), Samuel Arnold, Joseph Ganthony, Tommaso Giordani and James Hook. It reinforces Rice's point that the instrument was well established in English musical life by the early 1770s. A systemic search through opera scores, song collections, psalmody collections and military band music of the period would doubtless fill out the picture further.