mplexity of fingering, due to there being no less
than eighteen sound holes. Much has been done to graft Boehm's system
of fingering upon the clarinet, but the thirteen key system, invented
early in this century by Iwan Muller, is still most employed. The
increased complication of mechanism is against a change, and there is
even a stronger reason, which I cannot do better than translate, in
the appropriate words of M. Lavoix fils, the author of a well-known
and admirable work upon instrumentation:

"Many things have still to be done, but inventors must not lose
the point in view, that no tone quality is more necessary to the
composer than that of the clarinet in its full extent; that it
is very necessary especially to avoid melting together the two
registers of chalumeau and clarinet, so distinct from each
other. If absolute justness for these instruments is to be
acquired at the price of those inestimable qualities, it would
be better a hundred times to leave it to virtuosi, thanks to
their ability, to palliate the defects of their instrument,
rather than sacrifice one of the most beautiful and intensely
colored voices of our orchestra."

There are several clarinets of various pitches, and formerly more than
are used now, owing to the difficulty of playing except in handy keys.
In the modern orchestra the A and B flat clarinets are the most used;
in the military band, B flat and E flat. The C clarinet is not much
used now. All differ in tone and quality; the A one is softer than the
B flat; the C is shrill. The B flat is the virtuoso instrument. In
military bands the clarinet takes the place which would be that of the
violin in the orchestra, but the tone of it is always characteristically
different. Although introduced in the time of Handel and Bach those
composers made no use of it. With Mozart it first became a leading
orchestral instrument.

The Basset horn, which has become the sensuously beautiful alto
clarinet in E flat, is related to the clarinet in the same way that
the cor Anglais is to the oboe. Basset is equivalent to Baryton (there
is a Basset flute figured in Praetorius), and this instrument appears
to have been invented by one Horn, living at Passau, in Bavaria, about
1770. His name given to the instrument has been mistranslated into
Italian as Corno di Bassetto. There is a bass clarinet employed with
effect by Meyerbeer in the "Huguenots," but the character