<i>Howe's School for the Clarionett</i> : A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Tutor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is fascinating to me as an educator and musician to study early instrumental tutors. Over the years I have gained an appreciation and respect for the many authors who have compiled and made available appropriate materials in the hope of encouraging the American public to participate in the joys of music making. What was the content of these early instrumental tutors? In what ways are contemporary method similar to or different from early instructional books? How do these method reflect society's musical tastes and preferences, both past and present? I have chosen to do a content analysis (1) of Howe's School for the Clarionett, compiled and published by Elias Howe Jr. of Boston in 1843. (2) This method book, intended as complete for the clarinet, has been selected as a example of a mid-nineteenth-century American instrumental tutor. Elias Howe (1820-1895) is remembered primarily as a Boston music publisher and instrument dealer. (3) He published a number of instrumental methods for flute, clarinet, violin, fife, flageolet, and accordeon (4) in addition to a large collection of comic, national and sentimental songs titled The Amateur's Song Book. (5) On the back page of the 1843 instrumental method, Howe advertises no less than thirteen valuable instrumental music books which he authored, each containing numerous musical selections. (6) By 1850, due to the success and popularity of his various instrumental (his violin self-instruction method is reported to have sold over 500,000 copies), Howe sold his entire catalogue to the Boston publisher Oliver Ditson. Their agreement included the stipulation that Howe would not publish anything himself for a period of ten years. By 1860, Howe returned to the publishing business and also began selling musical instruments. (7) The company, having been passed on to his sons after his death, was sold in 1931. Regrettably the music catalogue plates were destroyed. (8) Introduction Howe's School for the Clarionett was Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1843, by Elias Howe, Jr. in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. (9) Howe meticulously identified himself to be the publisher and A. B. Kidder of No. 7 Cornhill, Boston, to be responsible for the stereotyping and printing. (10) Howe uses the word clarionett when referring to the clarinet. This spelling can also be found in earlier instrumental books. (11) In his book tracing the history of the clarinet, Rendall states: The English name has been from the beginning Clarinet. It occurs at least as early as 1733 as the name of a popular song in the ballad opera Achilles. The spelling with an o inserted was favoured by the poets, by Cowper in 1784; and the resulting 'clarionet' is also preferred by Keats and by Sidney Lanier, American poet and flautist. This grandiose form lingered on into the early years of the present century, but has now, it is to be hoped, vanished for ever. For the curious in these matters it may be observed that the longer form is found in use as a surname in 1559-60, when one Marmaduke Clarionett was named as an escheator for the City of York. (12) It is possible that Howe chose this spelling in order to give the impression of being truly informed in the area of clarinet instruction. (In this, he is not unlike an individual who refers to one who plays the flute as a flautist rather than using the more common term flutist.) A careful inspection of the front cover reveals many informative statements relating not only to the content of the tutor but also to musical life in America during the early part of the nineteenth century. Howe refers to his book as a School for the Clarionett, implying that this is an organized methodology, which contains new and complete instruction for the study of the clarinet. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".