Variations For Clarinet And Piano Analysis

Variations for Clarinet and Piano, By Carl Maria Von Weber
(In the point of view of Max)
Maria Carl Von Weber was a famous composer during the early 1800s. He composed many well known pieces like the variations for clarinet and piano. Even though this is not his most famous accomplishment, this is still a very challenging piece to play with simplifications in most of the variations. Although it took around 3 months to learn the piece, I now have confidence while playing. I also have won an honorable mention award at the young artists competition in Worcester playing this piece despite competing against 8 violin and piano players (which means I'm at a huge disadvantage.) The piece is divided into and introduction theme, and 7 variations of
While not impossible, I still have lots of trouble playing this part of the piece and usually end up playing it multiple times every session. The easiest part of the piece would have to be the theme itself. It is very straight forward with easy rhythms and notes. I even got a very good compliment from the judges on this section of the music.
I like this piece very much as has been one of my favorite pieces of classical music that I can play well. It is also the only piece that I have won an award with, giving the piece some sentimental value. The theme is a quiet theme that is slow, and soothing. The notes are lower down on the register so the piece sounds very rich. The first variation however, is very different from the theme. The first variation is faster, happier, and contains more energy. The notes go much higher and the rhythms get faster to include 16th notes. The 3rd variation becomes slow again and the music goes back to being a soothing, relaxing piece. Although the variation is slow, the notes and rhythms are the hardest out of the entire piece. The notes span 3 octaves and have very complicated rhythms as stated above. The 5th variation is a mix of classical, and jazz. The notes and rhythms give
The reeds that I had went through a testing process where I played a scale to warm the reed up, and then played a small section of each variation to make sure it sounded nice. If the reed was not of good quality, the reed would be put back into the box with a marking to show it was tested and how good it is. Sometimes testing 10 reeds would take the entire 1 hour class! We tested the reeds because the variations are all very different from one another and we needed one reed that could play all variations well and so we spent many hours trying out reeds of different strengths (2.5,3,3.5,4) to see which strength best suited the piece. We had started with 4 but figured out I had to use too much air to produce stable sound. Next I tried a 3.5 but I had the same issue. So we went to 3 strength reeds and most of them worked perfectly, not to strong, but not too soft either. we had also tried a 2.5 strength reed but that was a little too soft and also cracked during one of my practices. While we were testing the reeds, I felt like Goldilocks trying to figure out which bowl of food to eat! Later on, I did find a reed that was not too strong, yet not too soft and played well for me during the conpetition. We also