The clarinet and the orchestra grew up, in a certain sense, together. Granted, there had been early orchestras, some with wind instruments, prior to the invention of the clarinet around 1700. Lully in France and Corelli in Italy were both pioneers in directing and composing for orchestral ensembles in the second half of the seventeenth century. But the full concert or symphonic orchestra as we know it today—including multiple pairs of like wind instruments—was still in a formative stage in the first half of the eighteenth century, and its instrumentation continued to evolve at different rates in different places throughout that century.

Likewise the clarinet. Like any new piece of technology, it experienced a time lag between its invention in the early eighteenth century and its general adoption some decades later. Although composers wrote concertos for it as early as the 1720s, it did not appear as a member of the concert orchestra (that is, in non-operatic “sinfonias” featuring the ensemble independently rather than as an accompaniment) on even an ad hoc basis until the 1750s, and was not a regular participant until the early nineteenth century. In the 1770s and 1780s, if you were of high enough social status to receive an invitation to an entertainment at a noble court that supported an orchestra, or wealthy enough to buy a ticket to one of the public concerts that were proliferating in places like Paris or London, you might—or might not—have seen and heard clarinets in the orchestra. If you did, they would probably have been played by the same performers who, in an earlier work on the program, had played oboe parts; even at this stage the clarinet was still too new to have acquired a cadre of specialist players.

The eighteenth century thus presents us with a web of new developments in instrumental combinations and musical genres, and we must follow the early history of the clarinet in the concert orchestra against this changing backdrop. By 1800, though, the orchestral woodwind section had attained a largely standardized instrumentation that included a pair of clarinets. In fact, this woodwind section remained stable for much of the nineteenth century, in spite of a few outliers like Berlioz and Liszt, whose orchestrational experiments were not uniformly adopted.