Bassoon Instruments
Bassoon Fast Facts
The bassoon is an agile instrument – a little heavy in its lowest register, and very expressive in its middle range. The upper register is rather tense and penetrating. Besides forming a perfect bass to the rest of the woodwind the bassoon blends well with certain other instruments, such as the cellos and horns. The opening of the second movement of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra is a nice example of its orchestral use, and there are effective concertos by Mozart and Weber.
It is not a transposing instrument. It is made of wood, usually maple, in four sections: the bell joint, the bass joint, the butt, and the wing joint, The bore is conical, graduating from 1/8 inch to about 1 ˝ inches at the bell end. A double reed, ˝ inch wide, fits into a curved metal crook which in turn fits into the top of the wing joint. The player holds the butt close to their right hip with their right hand, while their left hand grasps the bass and wing joints.
A Brief History of the Bassoon
The bassoon is so called on account of its low voice. In scores it is called the fagotto, fagot or fagotte, referring to the fact that the tubes are bound together, not to its resemblance to a bundle of wood, the word for which comes from the same French root.
The most recent and exhaustive book on the bassoon, by Lyndesay G. Langwill, states that ‘The origin of the bassoon is still shrouded in mystery. Even its country of origin is uncertain.’ A degree of confidence is however expressed in the belief that the bassoon’s immediate ancestor was the curtal. But since ‘curtal’ has at various times been spelled corthol, curtail, curtil and curtall, and confused with the fagottino and the phagotum, quite apart form the courtaut and the cervelat (which is also the name for a short, fat sausage), it can be appreciated that nomenclature, far from clarifying, adds to the confusion. The evocative names bombard, brummer and pommer are also implicated in the murky mystery of origins, some scholars having declared that the curtal is a curtailed pommer.
The fact is that one of the unique features of bassoon
construction, and one that is a major contributory factor to the timbre
of the instrument, is the holes. A large, long tube needs large holes,
which cannot be covered by normal human finger tips anyway, so the holes
of the bassoon have always been bored obliquely. Partly as a result of
this, partials or harmonics in the sound are stronger than the fundamental,
and it can happen that some listeners hear only those upper partials and
are led to believe that they are misreading the score, or that the bassoonist
is playing the wrong notes.
In common with other wind instruments the bassoon gradually
acquired more keys from the 17th century onwards. The parts were then
separately bored, turned and wrapped with metal hoops. But it was discovered
that too much tampering with the configuration of the U-shaped tube and
obliquely bored holes altered the timbre of the instrument too radically,
so after about the middle of the 19th century little more was done to
‘improve’ it. By then it was in any case a valued member of the symphony
orchestra.
It is believed that it was first introduced into the orchestra in France by a then sensational composer and hated rival of Lully, Robert Cambert. Cambert was the originator of French opera and it was in Pomone that he included the voice of the bassoon in the score.
Because they are both double reed instruments, the oboe and the bassoon are sometimes described together, as though the former were simply a complement in compass to the latter. But this is not so, as the position of the bassoon in the score must show. In the 18th century it was used to double with cellos, and its presence was so much taken for granted that bassoonists would be present and ready to double. In the 19th century it gradually won a more independent role and was acclaimed as ‘the gentleman of the orchestra’.
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