Sheet Music Reviews: Journeys by Clarinet

Journeys by Clarinet is a collection of short unaccompanied pieces by Mark Elvin – a freelance musician with 30 years’ experience as a composer, performer and educator. During the lockdown, he set himself the challenge of self-publishing his compositions, creating Mucky Herbert Music.

The ‘Journeys’ books are currently available for clarinet, trumpet and tuba, with more planned. The first was Journeys by Tuba, written for the Trinity exam syllabus with two pieces at each Grade from 1 to 8. The clarinet and trumpet versions are written along the same lines, with 16 progressive solo pieces covering a variety of styles and technical challenges. Each piece is no longer than a single A4 page, and a couple of the easier numbers are just a few lines long. This means they can be learned fairly quickly, but some of the more advanced numbers feel a little musically undeveloped. Longer pieces can also help improve stamina, which is especially important for advancing players tackling more substantial repertoire.

The pieces have descriptive titles indicating their style or character, such as ‘The Flea’, ‘Stealthy Approach’ and ‘Bop-Tastic’, but there are no additional performance notes or playing tips. ‘Echo Samba’, ‘The Flame’ and the aptly named ‘Hemiola Waltz’ present some tricky rhythmic challenges, while ‘The Unicycle’ – constantly pedalling around throat B flats – provides a testing crossing-the-break workout. All the pieces have real character and would certainly work well in various performance situations.

Over half the pieces have been transposed from the original tuba book. This is common practice for an education series with books for different instruments, but always runs the risk that idiosyncrasies are overlooked. A handful of pieces in Journeys by Clarinet mainly sit around the throat notes and clarion register, not really making use of the lowest range; however, all the chosen keys work well, and the melodies sit nicely under the fingers.

From a commercial standpoint, I think there needs to be more pieces in the book, especially as it covers such a wide range of abilities. If a book only has 16 pieces, it is perhaps better for them all to be at the same broad ability level, typically beginner, intermediate or advanced. However, each piece in Journeys by Clarinet is also available to download individually on the Mucky Herbert Music website (priced £1.49 to £1.79), so there is the option for players to just purchase pieces at their current level. The whole book is available printed for £16 or as a downloadable PDF for £14. MIDI recordings of each piece are also available on the website.

muckyherbertmusic.com