Associate professor Nophachai Cholthitchanta has been playing the clarinet since he was 13, and collecting early examples of the instrument since his college days. He has nearly 400 instruments in his suburban Fayetteville home. Photos by Russell Cothren.
It’s not hard to understand why Nophachai Cholthitchanta has amassed a collection of 400-plus historic clarinets, some of which are displayed in a spare bedroom of his suburban Fayetteville home. Handcrafted and intriguing, each instrument is like a small mystery waiting to be solved. Where was it made, how and by whom? What does it reveal about the technology of its time and the evolution of this unique instrument?
Of course, they are also nice to look at. “I am fascinated with the beauty of them,” said Cholthitchanta, an associate professor of clarinet in the Department of Music. “Especially the boxwood. I love the boxwood. I remember my first boxwood clarinet. I was so excited I could not sleep. I walk into this room and my heart pounds, they are so beautiful.”
Ancient Musical History
Instruments that make music by moving air past a fluctuating reed are as old as antiquity. The earliest forms were simply a cane with a notch cut near a knot in the plant body allowing a sliver of the cane to vibrate. Holes cut in the cane allowed the player to make various notes, similar to a recorder.
In medieval Europe, an instrument called the chalumeau was in widespread use, which still bore a resemblance to early cane instruments. But steady advances in technology and skill meant improvements in instrument-making until, around 1700, woodwind maker J.C. Denner (1655-1707) of Nuremberg created what is considered the first clarinet. At the time the chalumeau and the clarinet looked similar; the main difference is that Denner’s instrument was able to reach a higher register, thanks to a key covering a tone hole located high on the instrument’s body.
That improvement, and many that followed, made the clarinet more versatile. Composers understood the versatility and incorporated the new instrument into their work. The clarinet flourished while the chalumeau all but disappeared.
Modern clarinets, characterized by levers and valves for opening and closing tone holes, came along in the 1800s. While there are still different types of clarinets in use today, most are standardized around what is known as the Boehm system.
But it’s the early instruments that interest Cholthitchanta. “Lots of music collectors collecting everything,” he said. “For me, I really put my emphasis on the clarinet only.”
Clarinets Provide Clues
A native of Thailand, Cholthitchanta, has been playing the clarinet since he was 13. Once the principal clarinetist for the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra, he joined the music faculty at the University of Arkansas in 2001.
Cholthitchanta began collecting while in college and quickly realized that it was difficult to find information on how early instruments were made. At the time, the clarinet wasn’t as beloved by collectors and scholars as other orchestral instruments. It’s become quite popular since.
Cholthitchanta is methodical about the hobby. After buying a new piece for his collection, he takes it apart, cleans it and restores it to playable, but not perfect, condition. Clarinets were meant to be used, and wear is part of the patina. He also scrutinizes them for clues to their making. His goal is to one day incorporate what he’s discovered into a book on early clarinets, exactly the sort of resource he didn’t have as a novice collector.
The oldest instrument in his collection is from 1750 and was built by Thomas Cahusac Sr. (1714-1798) in London. It’s constructed of the European boxwood Cholthitchanta finds so aesthetically pleasing. It has a deep, brown luster that speaks of the passing of centuries. The flare at the end, called the bell, is uniquely concave; most from the period are convex. What’s really exciting, however, is a tiny stamp Cholthitchanta noticed when taking the instrument apart to clean it.
“There are a lot of instruments by Cahusac that survive,” he said. “It’s difficult to tell between him and his son. None of them has the stamp of the ‘Lancastrain Rose.’ It’s quite exciting when we found it. Everybody says they had never seen these before.”
Yes or no, the excitement is in the discovery. Cholthitchanta recalled his reaction to finding it: “Oh my goodness, it’s a John Hale key. Everything just brightened up.”
Then there’s the tale told by a tiny spring that closes a valve on another 18th- century clarinet by a French maker, Isaac Keller (1745-1802) in Strasbourg, France. In the 1700s, metal work was difficult and expensive. Yet, springs broke. Keller designed his spring in such a way that it was possible for clarinet owners to make the repair themselves, a technological breakthrough. That’s the kind of detail that tends to be found by people with a passion for the instruments.
“Most of these features are discovered by private collectors,” Cholthitchanta said. “You’d need special permission to go to a museum and look for these things, and even then you can’t take them apart. But that feature tells us a lot about how the instrument was made.”
Hearing What Mozart Heard
If such details interest only collectors, where they lead is of interest to all students of music.
In the early days, how a particular instrument sounded had yet to be standardized. Instrument makers had many and varied ideas about how their creations should be played and tuned, and what they were capable of musically. A clarinet from one region sounded different than a clarinet from another region. Many were tuned to organs in local churches, a common performance venue.
“One town has a different pitch than another because they were tuned to the pitch of the organ in church,” Cholthitchanta said. “New York in 1750, for example, had a different pitch than New Jersey.”
Determining the pitch of a clarinet is a clue to where it came from and who made it. And that’s valuable insight into how composers wrote music.
“Once you play it, you hear what Mozart heard,” he says. “Why he used a particular note. There is a characteristic of the sound. Old instruments don’t have homogenous sounds. Composers used that to their advantage.”
When clarinets were standardized the world over, much was gained in terms of consistency and playability. Someone from England could play alongside someone from France, for example, and they’d be in tune. But to Cholthitchanta, something was also lost, a sense of experimentation and exploration that’s lacking in modern instruments.
“From 1838 to today, they look exactly alike, which is sad,” he says. “We just stopped innovating, we are too conservative. I think we could do better, but we are too conservative to change.”
