Running joke aside...
...I wonder where this demand for alto clarinets is coming from. There was no commercial demand for the things that I have been able to discern.
As an academic exercise many years ago during a day off from work with nothing better to do, I pulled a huge number of modern scores from an extensive collection maintained at Washington University ("in Saint Louis", as the NCAA crowd says whenever the place is mentioned, to differentiate them from places with a real sports program), and checked them for both bass clarinet and other "odd" (non-Bb or A soprano) clarinets. I compiled the results on a tabulation pad, the sort of thing we folks used to work with numbers back before spreadsheets were invented.
Other than a mere sprinkling of inclusions in the works of Percy Granger (sic?), stuff like Apollo and the Boatman (sic?), and one or two graduate student productions, the alto clarinet column on the sheets was blank. Indeed, there were more 'modern' inclusions of the basset horn and contra-clarinets than there were of the poor old alto.
With evidence like that, as well as what we see in current band and orchestra arrangements, you have to wonder why makers persist in making the things. Personally, I see the occasional use of the basset horn and contra-clarinets as a "novelty" employment, the inclusion of something different for difference's sake. With that in mind, the question arises as to why the alto clarinet is not similarly included.
The orchestration books that I have tend to use terms like "insipid" when describing the alto clarinet. The tonal quality must have something to do with it, as rarity, lack of someone to play them, or difficulty of playing one well obviously aren't the reason.
The bass sax isn't a perfect parallel here. For one thing, them big saxophones are a lot more expensive to buy. Their maintenance in playing condition is a problem as well, much moreso than would be keeping an alto in similar condition. And, their transportation and deployment is a much larger problem than is that of the alto - at least you can carry the weight of a helicorn or sousaphone on your shoulder and march with it without having to worry about hitting your neighbor in the formation.
I conducted another exercise once, this when wondering about the disappearance of the bass saxophone from the musical landscape. Both of my parents attended Saint Louis area high schools, and due to district reassignments, they attended four different high schools during that time span. They also kept their high school annuals/"yearbooks" for each year of their schooling.
Each of the four schools covered by those annuals had a bass saxophone shown in their concert band photos. (That they were all different horns was made obvious by things like horn design and dent patterns.) From that (admittedly very limited) bit of data, and considering things like American population distribution during the period, the extent of the American middle class in the late 1930's and such, I churned the numbers and came up with the possibility of more than two thousand bass saxophones that should have been in existence in 1938. (And, I made sure to round down at every opportunity, taking care not to allow my affection for the bass sax to skew the results.)
With this (admittedly flimsy, but perhaps the best synthesis available in the absence of stuff like Conn bass saxophone production records) in mind, where are all the oceans of bass saxophones that once existed? Speculation ranges from "melted down for World War II artillery shell casings" to the very hopeful "hidden in a school district's warehouse somewhere". They surface occasional basis, as evidenced by postings here and elsewhere, but in nothing like the numbers that my conservative calculations had indicated.
With that in mind, consider the alto clarinet. I didn't pay the band's alto clarinet content the least bit of attention (all bands had multiple bass clarinets, but I don't recall any of those half-bent alto necks showing up in any of the portraits), but let's assume that they were there nonetheless. By extension, there should be a goodly amount of old alto clarinets kicking around in the secondary market.
And, indeed there are. I frequented school district auctions during the 1980's in the Saint Louis area and surrounding Missouri and Illinois counties, looking for that hidden bass sax to surface. I found plenty of beaten to death baritone saxes, bassoons, bass clarinets and (as expected) alto clarinets in droves, but never - not once - any portion of a bass saxophone.
What gives here? Damn'd if I could figure it out, other than junked altos are a glut on the market while bass saxophones have vaporized. But, I did notice in the auctions that the only time the alto clarinets were sold was when they were bundled in a job lot with a number of other instruments.
Look, I'm not against clarinets in general, nor against the concept of an alto voice. I employ women with alto ranges as my vocalists whenever possible. I can play the basset horn, and do pretty well at it, by all accounts. When performing vocal SSA arrangements as clarinet trios, I enjoy playing the alto part on the bass. Hell, I even dated a viola player for an extended period once. (She's now a "save the whales" type activist, and routinely gets arrested for her protest activities.)
But, I draw the line at the alto clarinet. While the quality horns work as well as any other properly constructed clarinet (which means, avoid the "single register" mechanism on them just as much as on a bass clarinet), there's nothing in the horn's range or tonal pallet that the bass clarinet can't do just as well, all while bringing more to the table in the bargain.
And, their diminished role in music these days seems to indicate that I may be on to something. Whatever the reason, the alto clarinet (like the viola de gamba, the basset horn, the ophicleide and yes, even the bass saxophone) is being fitted for its slot in the dustbin of musical history. Revival is always possible, and negative voices like mine will someday be silenced by the march of time, so hope springs eternal. But, I'm not going long on Yamaha alto clarinet manufacturing stock...
