The clarinet has been part of European musical life for a little more than 300 years. This makes it rather new by comparison with many other instruments. Yet, once established, it was adopted for use in military bands, orchestras, and popular music of many different types. Today it is a familiar instrument played by both professionals and ama-teurs, heard in settings ranging from school bands to world-renowned orchestras, from community musical theater productions to Broadway, and in genres from klezmer and Brazilian choros to symphonic music and jazz. From simple beginnings around 1700, the clarinet has developed into a sophisticated and versatile instrument.

Numerous excellent English-language books have been written about the clarinet, starting with F. Geoffrey Rendall's monograph of 1954 and continuing through recent works by Rice, Lawson, Hoe-prich, and others. These provide excellent comprehensive surveys of the instrument's history. Why, then, another book? The answer is at least twofold. In the first place, previous writings have been aimed at readers with a rather specialized knowledge, insiders with a working understanding of the clarinet's technical, mechanical, and musical intricacies. The present book, on the other hand, has a more varied readership in mind. As part of a set of volumes on musical instruments within the series Eastman Studies in Music, its rationale is to appeal to a broad spectrum of readers: not only those engaged as professionals or students in the field of music, but also musically informed amateurs, concert-goers, recording collectors, and the like. Secondly, rather than attempting exhaustive coverage of the entire history and development of a given instrument, the volumes in this set focus on selected topics related to repertoire, style, and other matters that are manifestly central to the history of the instrument and its uses in musical life, yet in many cases are not covered extensively elsewhere in the literature. The chapter authors are leading musicologists, historians, and performing musicians (many occupy more than one of these roles), who present unique perspectives reflecting wide experience in their disciplines.

The emphasis in this book is therefore not so much on the clarinet as an object as on the way it has been used, by various types of composers and players in different kinds of music, over the span of more than three centuries.