The Müller System on the clarinet.

What is a system in organology ?

A system encompasses all the different technical tools and settings the maker gives to the instrument to function as intended, and also to fit his ideas on the instrument. Depending on the settings the maker gives to the instruments, they can create their own specific system, or fit an already known system. In clarinet the different settings that generally change between system can be the keys, the rings, the bore and even the shape of the reed. But too much differences in the settings would divide them in to two different type of instruments. Like the difference between saxophone and clarinet as an example.

Iwan Müller

Iwan Müller is a Russo-Estonian clarinetist, instrument maker and composer born in 1786 in Reval in Estonia. He became a musician in the court of St-Petersburg until 1807, but already in 1803 he was collaborating with an instrument maker from France to improve the classical 5 keys clarinet. Beetween 1809 and 1812 he’s travelling a lot beetween Germany, Austria and France. While creating the alto clarinet in F (not the basset horn), with Grenser the famous clarinet maker, he continues at the same time to improve his Müller’s System clarinet.

The Müller innovation

Müller wants to fix a major issue with the classical clarinet. The pads are made of a thin layer of felt on a flat key, and the springs that are actually more like needles are loose and incrustated in the bumped part of the wood. The more keys the clarinet had, the more leaks in it because the pads were not airtight. And then, the clarinet was losing a lot of projection, and opposed more resistance. The musicians were used to play with less keys but had to play with a lot of forked fingerings, which increased the difficulties of virtuosic parts, and unbalance the sound quality. Then for exemple in a scale with an equal movement of sixteenth notes, every notes were different in time, volume, tuning and in every legato between them.
So he made bulged pads made of leather padded in by felt or wool, and he combined that with countersunk toneholes to fix the airtight issues, and from there, adding a lot of keys wasn't a problem anymore.
He also added metal plots to avoid the complexity of adding bumps during the woodturning step, and add a key for the F/C2, but some makers still use the woodbump system even on Müller system clarinet, like in this example from an anonym where they still use the Woodbump technique except for the F/C2 and Ab/Eb2. To compare with the classical clarinet from Lotz or Grenser the bore of the Müller clarinet will be slighlty more open, to increase the projection and the brightness. In the other hand, depending on the maker of the Müller clarinet, fork fingerings can be less effective than with the classical model, and even if these fingerings are less useful, musicians are used to them. He is also the inventor of the metal ligature for the mouthpiece.

The Müller keywork

With all these innovations he made a 13 keys clarinet which he called it “la clarinette omnitonique” because it is way more capable to travel between tonalities than the classical one. His goal was to avoid all these “corps de rechange” and switch every time between the A/Bb/C clarinets. Here are all the innovative key works he made, thanks to the airtight pads allowing a wide range of keys :

  1. A key to close for the Low F/C2
  2. A key to open for the Low Bb/F2
  3. A key to open for increasing intonation of B/F#
  4. A key to open for the Eb/Bb2
  5. A key to open for the F1/C3 to evitate the cross fingering
  6. The key of G#1 is crossing the key of A1 (not common on earlies Müller’s clarinets)
  7. A key to open for the Trill A1/B1 And later on his 15th keys clarinet he added :

A. he moved the register hole, on the top or the side of the clarinet to avoid condensation issues

B. A thumb key to open, for the Ab/Eb2

C. A thumb key to open for the Low F#/C#2

Müller and his clarinet system during the 19th century

In 1809 Iwan Müller created the clarinet concerto op.36 of Philipp Jakob in Vienna, made for his freshly new clarinette omnitonique. In 1810 he created his own and first clarinet concerto in d minor in Munich, on this same clarinet.

In 1812 he opened an atelier to make music instruments in Paris, and showed his innovation to La comission du conservatoire de Paris, but they didn’t like it, and then his store didn’t have much success. But Jean-Baptiste Gambaro loved this intrument he composed for it, and made it really popular in France and Italy. Composer like Rossini and Berlioz composed for this system of clarinet in their orchestral works.

Jean-Xavier Lefèvre, who at first rejected the Müller clarinet in the comission, finally played on it. Frédéric Berr and his famous student Hyacinthe Eléonore Klosé in le conservatoire de Paris played the Müller system, until Klosé co-created with August Buffet the Boehm Clarinet system in 1839.

Müller is soloist in Le Thêatre Italien in Paris until 1820, followed by Berr in 1823 and by Klosé in 1836. He left france in 1820 to travel and work back to Russia and Germany and in fact the whole Europe. He died in february 1854 in Bückeburg as a court musician.

System Müller an open door for Belgian and German system ?

Already in 1840 Eugène Albert, assistant of Adolphe Sax, improved the Müller system by using some Adolphe sax's rings on the upper body of the clarinet, some years before Sax even put rings on the lower body. The Albert clarinet during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century was a serious competitor against the Boehm system, and was really popular in the U.S.A.

Around the same time, in Austria and Germany Carl Baermann son of Heinrich the creator of the weber clarinet repertoire, and Georg Ottensteiner, worked on the Müller system to develop the Baermann-Ottensteiner system, visually really similar to the Albert system but with a thinner bore and different moutpiece and reeds. Richard Mühlfeld played on an Baermann-Ottensteiner clarinet to creat the brahms clarinet repertoire. And finally, in 1905 the Ottensteiner clarinet was the based to develop the Oehler System, which is currently used by professional clarinetists from Austria and Germany.

References

  1. https://cledzh.jimdofree.com/

  2. https://clariboles-et-cie.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2023-06-23T16:50:00-07:00&max-results=30&m=0

Pictures by appearances :

  1. Portrait of Iwan Müller.
  2. Classical set of clarinets by Schwenk & Seggelke.
  3. Müller system Clarinet, Anonymous.
  4. Countersunk and not countersunk tone holes.
  5. 14 keys Müller system clarinet, Anonymous, collection of Christian Ledermanns.
  6. Sketch of Müller’s system clarinet, Méthode pour la nouvelle clarinette, annotated by Christian Ledermanns.
  7. Müller-Sax system clarinet, by Charles Mahillon, collection of Christian Ledermanns.
  8. Müller system clarinet, Albert system clarinet and Oehler system clarinet.