If you are a clarinetist looking to improve your multiphonic skills — I teach a course on improving tone, register control and embouchure flexibility using multiphonics as the basis on tonebase (where — full disclosure — I’m also head of clarinet). You can try the course and tonebase clarinet with a 14-day free trial (and if you do, please do join the community forum and come say hello!).

I don’t think there’s been anything more requested than this post. And I don’t have a good reason for not having done it before now, it’s just years-long procrastination. I talk a lot about where the technique comes from (much associated with Sciarrino’s Let me die before I wake) and how to use them in my old post on bass clarinet multiphonic trills.

I also talk about Sciarrino’s work in the following YouTube Video, which covers some other techniques he uses:

Here – like in the post on the bass clarinet multiphonic trills, I’ve included all of those trilling either the index finger and thumb key. I think these offer a lot of options in terms of the potential virtuosity of your material: it’s quite easy to continue trilling either key with either the left index finger or thumb, while changing the bottom note.

Sciarrino’s piece is written for a full-boehm clarinet in Bb – this is not the instrument played by most players. The instrument has a low Eb key, the range is extended by one semi-tone, and he makes extensive use of the multiphonics possible with that key. I have included the multiphonics possible with that key but please, please, please be aware that most players will not have these available.

As ever, all of the pitches here are in written – not sounding – notation. The harmonics on top are the individual pitches available, they cannot be played simultaneously (please listen to the audio for clarity of what I mean). That said, some of the pitches, when chosen, do naturally form compound multiphonics and don’t isolate that well (this can’t really be controlled by the player). This happens particularly strongly for me when I play the B natural fingerings and choose the high G, the D quarter sharp finds its way in there as well. (Not entirely sure if this will be the same for other players, so please try this with your collaborator.)

If I play these loudly, the control of the top harmonic gets more difficult – for me, one of the available pitches tends to be more stable than the rest, and so I’ve marked that one with an arrow in the pitch diagram, and provided audio of what it sounds like loud. Because this is the pitch that most naturally comes out at a loud dynamic, I believe it will also be the easiest one to achieve at a quiet dynamic – so pick this pitch if you’re writing for someone with less experience in multiphonics.

The loud ones become increasingly unstable as I move up through the register with a few exceptions, the two on the A fingering sound really raucous and full at a loud dynamic. Also worth being aware that I found the high G on the Bb fingering particularly fragile in the quiet dynamic (and non-existent in loud).

The fingerings are marked either +i or +t – this always refers to the trilling of either the left hand index finger or thumb. There are a lot of ways you could write this, but just including a normal trill fingering with the text +i, and an explanation (and a link to this blog post) in your foreword might do the trick.

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