The first and last difficult to obtain with reeds as
made by us. He seeks the fundamental tones of the Maket pipes in the
first or low register, an octave below the normal pitch. By this the
fifths revert to twelfths. I offer no opinion, but will leave this
curious phenomenon to the consideration of my friends, Mr. Blaikley,
Mr. Victor Mahillon, and Mr. Hermann Smith, acousticians intimate with
wind instruments.
The clarinet was invented about A.D. 1700, by Christopher Denner, of
Nuremberg. By his invention, an older and smaller instrument, the
chalumeau, of eleven notes, without producible harmonics, was, by an
artifice of raising a key to give access to the air column at a
certain point, endowed with a harmonic series of eleven notes a
twelfth higher. The chalumeau being a cylindrical pipe, the upper
partials could only be in an odd series, and when Denner made them
speak, they were consequently not an octave, but a twelfth above the
fundamental notes. Thus, an instrument which ranged, with the help of
eight finger holes and two keys, from F in the bass clef to B flat in
the treble had an addition given to it at once of a second register
from C in the treble clef to E flat above it.
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