Notes for Clarinetists A Guide to the Repertoire

Notes for Clarinetists: A Guide to the Repertoire offers important historical and analytical information about thirty-five of the best-known pieces written for the instrument. Numerous contextual and theoretical insights make it an essential resource for professional, amateur, and student clarinetists. With engaging prose supported by fact-filled analytical charts, the book offers rich biographical information and informative analyses to help clarinetists gain a more complete understanding of Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo by Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland's Concerto for Clarinet, String Orchestra, Harp, and Piano, Robert Schumann's Fantasy Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 73. and Time Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 43. by Robert Muczynski, among many others.

With close attention to matters of context, style, and harmonic and formal analysis, Albert Rice explores a significant portion of the repertoire, and offers a faithful and comprehensive guide that includes works by Boulez, Brahms, and Mozart to Hindemith, Poulenc, and Stamitz. Rice includes biographical information on each composer and highlights history's impact on the creation and performance of important works for clarinet.

Intended as a starting point for connecting performance studies with scholarship, Rice's analysis will help clarinetists gain a more complete picture of a given work. Its valuable insights make it essential to musicians preparing and presenting programs, and its detailed historical information about the work and composer will encourage readers to explore other works in a similarly analytical way. Covering concertos, chamber pieces, and works for solo clarinet, Rice presents Notes for Clarinetists as an indispensable handbook for students and professionals alike.

Albert R. Rice holds a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. He is a clarinetist, author, researcher, appraiser of musical instruments, past president of the American Musical Instrument Society, and review editor for the AMIS Journal and Newsletter. He has written three books on the history of the clarinet, published by Oxford University Press, and Four Centuries of Musical Instruments: the Catalog of the Marlowe A. Sigal Musical Instrument Collection, published by Schiffer Publications. He is also a retired librarian, and was a musical instrument museum curator. In 2011, he was awarded the American Musical Instrument Society's Curt Sachs Prize honoring lifetime devotion to scholarship related to musical instruments, and the 2011 Nicholas Besseraboff Prize for the most distinguished book-length work in English published in 2009 which best furthers the Society's goal "to promote study of the history, design, and use of musical instruments in all cultures and from all periods."