It took me a long time to realize the clarinet is one of the nastiest instruments in the composer’s toolbox.

And for most of that time, I was playing the clarinet.

Started in fourth grade, played through 12th grade. That’s nine years of honking and blarting, interrupted only by the occasional ear-piercing squeak.

What was I thinking, as I kept up with this?

It was something to do, I suppose. Got me out of choir, which I didn’t want to be involved with. In high school, the band sufficed as a “fine arts” credit, which allowed me to avoid the theater kids and the painters-sculptors-poets.

I also kinda liked the paramilitary aspects of the clarinet. In marching bands, clarinets are prominent because they get the parts that would be played by strings, in a more sedate setting. (Strings do not exist in marching bands.) Thus, you might find a dozen or more clarinets in a parade band, but then only a couple in an orchestra, which is more concerned with sound than noise.

Meantime, I became a vaguely competent clarinetist. Perhaps because I played the thing several times a year for most of a decade. It was not a Malcolm Gladwellian 10,000 hours. Maybe more like 1,000.

But I could generally get the fingering right, I was quick, and I was loud. Very loud. In a pep band setting (like a basketball game) “loud” had value.

In high school, where the marching band was also the concert band, I stalled out at “second chair, first clarinet.” Did three years of that. I was never able to get past my friend Dan Campbell, who was first chair for those three years.

So, my realization that the clarinet is a particularly inelegant instrument probably crashed home in my late teens, when I heard professionals playing the “licorice stick” (as it sometimes is known in American musical slang — because it looks a bit like one) in orchestras. And I grasped, eventually, something important.

These guys had tamed the clarinet.

In their hands, it became less offensive, aurally.

They mastered the several breaks in the clarinet’s range and made it seem closer to something seamless. (An example, here, at the 16:15 mark, from Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony.)

The problem with the clarinet is that it is asked to handle something like three octaves with the aid of a long, narrow key that is toggled by the left thumb as it covers a tonal hole.

The standard B-flat clarinet is pleasant in its low tones but it gets breathy and thin in its second octave because air is escaping from the upper end of the instrument, and the notes get fuzzy and imprecise and unpleasant. Thinking here of G, A, A-flat and B-flat.

Once the “register” key is toggled, the fingers cover most of the holes in the instrument, and the sound is strong and clear. But that doesn’t last long. By the time you’re up to “high” C, the clarinet often is quite shrill. Masking that is crucial, as well as eliminating the ear-piercing squeak — one of the most awful sounds in music — with careful fingering.

Smoothing over these awkward bits are the mark of a really good clarinetist, people who can make the instrument almost nice to listen to in an orchestra.

I know I rarely managed that, like many amateur clarinetists, and I was responsible for my share of squeaks — some of which can be heard on a professionally recorded album.

None other than Mozart thought the clarinet could be made to be pleasing to the ear; he created a clarinet concerto still played fairly often.

All these years later, I wish I had played the oboe or maybe the French horn — mellifluous instruments often entrusted with key passages in a piece.

But at the time, as an adolescent, I did not notice that I was contributing to aural pollution by playing the clarinet. Only the best of clarinettists should be allowed to play in public, and I was not one of those.

Oh, and I still have the clarinet I played for all but the first few months of my “career” — a nice wooden one that probably needs a few pads replaced but is otherwise in fine working order. My younger daughter used it for several years in her youth.