The tongue is so devised that it overlaps the opening and thus never passes through the opening when it vibrates. Acoustically, this style of tongue is known as a single beating reed. Primitive Egyptian clarinets were made of cane. The breath hole was made by a three-sided slit cut into the cane forming a rectangular tongue, the fourth uncut side allowing the tongue to vibrate because of the elasticity of the material. Thus the simple device of slitting the cane formed both the mouth-hole and the tongue, which in later clarinets were much more elaborately devised. Since the slit is cut obliquely, instead of squarely, through the side of the cane, the sharp edge of the tongue overlaps the opening.
The upper end with the vibrating reed is held entirely within the player’s mouth. As in glass blowing, breathing is exclusively through the nose, while the mouth emits a constant blast of air. Modification of timbre and force is not possible with this kind of blowing; the sound is emitted with unaltering strength and shrillness. Players of the modern Sardinian triple clarinet, launedda, train their pupils in this difficult technique by means of a straw and a vessel fllled with water; dipping the straw and blowing, the boy has to keep blowing while he is breathing in and out; if the water stops gurgling, the teacher gives him a box on the ear. The author was told at Cairo that Egyptian oboe players are trained in the same way.
The origin of the clarinet is unknown. It has been found in primitive civilizations, but only in recent layers, and the question of whether it migrated from lower to higher civilizations, or from higher to lower ones, is not yet decided. When the clarinet first appeared in the higher civilizations, it was in the form of the More complicated than the vertical flute, the double clarinet is an even more exciting proof of the incredible perseverance of musical instruments. All over the Islamic Orient, from Egypt to the Celebes, low-caste musicians play a double clarinet made of two canes a foot long, glued and tied alongside one another and provided with equidistant, and symmetrically arranged, fingerholes, either four or five or six in each cane; in the upper ends smaller canes are inserted, out of which the beating tongue is cut by a three-sided slit described above. These double clarinets are best known under their Arabic name zummâra. The player stops the corresponding holes of both tubes simultaneously with one finger, and as the holes, roughly cut into an uneven cane, produce slightly different pitches, the effect is a pulsating sound such as in the modern occidental organ stop, unda maris.
Double clarinets of exactly the same shape have been excavated from Egyptian tombs of the first century B.C. Moreover, the author recognized this instrument on a relief known to be as early as 2700 B.C. in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Above the sitting player the sculptor has carved the text, “Is playing the ma .t,” and added the unmistakable design of a double clarinet as a hieroglyphic determinative. This indicates that the instrument has existed for five thousand years without the slightest change.
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