Bassoon

• 1. Introduction

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  The bassoon is among the most unusual objects in a concert hall. Nearly 1.34 meters tall but with a total sounding length of 2.54 meters, it folds back on itself like a doubled-over tube, producing one of the lowest voices in the orchestra from a structure compact enough for a single player to hold. Its name traces to both French and Italian words meaning a bass-register instrument, yet in Italian concert scores it has always been called fagotto, a word borrowed from Old French meaning a bundle of sticks. That nickname is apt. The instrument disassembles into six main pieces, and it is typically made of wood. Its reed alone can take hours to build by hand from a length of Arundo donax cane.

  Why does an instrument this complex, this demanding to learn, and this expensive to own, ranging from US$7,000 to over $45,000, persist at the centre of orchestral music after several centuries? And how did a primitive Renaissance wind instrument become the vehicle for composers from Antonio Vivaldi to Igor Stravinsky to express some of their most daring musical ideas? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. From Dulcian to Bassoon

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  By the mid-16th century, an instrument called the dulcian was already available in as many as eight different sizes, from soprano to great bass. It served mainly as a bass voice in wind consorts, capable of playing loudly with shawms or softly with recorders, a remarkable dynamic flexibility for its era. Its technique was limited: eight finger holes and two keys, restricting it to only a small number of key signatures.

  The man most likely responsible for transforming the dulcian into the true bassoon was Martin Hotteterre, who died around 1712. Sometime in the 1650s, he appears to have reconceived the instrument as four separable sections, an arrangement that allowed the bore to be machined with far greater accuracy than the one-piece dulcian permitted. He also extended the compass downward by adding two keys. The dulcian itself was not immediately abandoned; Johann Sebastian Bach and others continued to use it well into the 18th century.

  Around 1700 a fourth key was added, producing the instrument for which Vivaldi, Bach, and Georg Philipp Telemann wrote. Vivaldi alone featured the bassoon in thirty-nine concerti. A fifth key arrived during the first half of the 18th century. Among the notable makers of these four-key and five-key baroque bassoons were J.H. Eichentopf, Thomas Stanesby Jr., and Prudent Thieriot, whose instrument-making careers spanned from the late 17th century into the latter half of the 18th.

• 3. Two Schools Divide the World

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  Carl Almenräder began overhauling the bassoon in 1823 with a treatise describing ways to improve intonation, response, and technical ease by rearranging the keywork. He had the unusual advantage of working at Schott, the music publisher, where he could build, test, and publish results in Caecilia, Schott's house journal. Ludwig van Beethoven himself requested one of the new instruments after hearing of the papers. In 1831 Almenräder left Schott to found his own workshop with a partner named Johann Adam Heckel, and the Heckel name would come to define one of the two primary forms the bassoon still takes today.

  Heckel and two subsequent generations of his family continued to refine the instrument. By the turn of the 20th century, Heckel himself had produced over 1,100 instruments, with serial numbers beginning at 3,000. Their success came partly from a singing tone quality that the Almenräder instruments had lacked. The Heckel system now dominates nearly everywhere outside France, Belgium, and parts of Latin America.

  The rival Buffet, or French, system took a different developmental path, one of incremental key-work improvements rather than wholesale overhaul. It carries 22 keys to the Heckel's greater number, uses a narrower bore, and reaches E5 and F5 with notably less air resistance than the German instrument. The conductor John Foulds, writing in 1934, lamented the Heckel system's spread, finding those instruments too similar in tone to the horn. The Buffet's more vocal, edged quality has kept it alive, particularly in France, where Buffet Crampon and the atelier Ducasse in Romainville still manufacture it today. The Selmer Company, by contrast, stopped producing French-system bassoons around 2012.

• 4. The Voice Composers Heard

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  W.A. Mozart's Bassoon Concerto in B-flat major, K. 191, written in the second movement for its singing quality, is considered by many to be among the most important works in the bassoon's entire repertoire. Josef Frohlich, writing in 1829, instructed students to practice as vocal students would, and he listed the qualities he believed the instrument could convey: "the worthy, the virile, the solemn, the great, the sublime, composure, mildness, intimacy, emotion, longing, heartfulness, reverence, and soulful ardour."

  That sense of a speaking human voice shaped how different countries deployed the instrument. In the Viennese orchestra, Mozart himself directed the bassoon to change its timbre depending on its partner: warmer with clarinets, hollow with flutes, dark and dignified with violins. In France, orchestras expanded their bassoon sections to four players in the latter half of the 19th century. Hector Berlioz pushed further, sometimes scoring for three or four and occasionally writing for up to eight, as in his l'Impériale.

  Giuseppe Verdi used the bassoon's lyrical voice to evoke emotion in his Messa da Requiem. In Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, bassoons play fortissimo alongside other bass instruments to represent what Mussorgsky described as "the voice of the Devil." Paul Dukas deployed the staccato attack to paint the image of two brooms coming to life in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Richard Wagner extended the instrument's range downward, wanting a low A that lay below the standard bottom B, and many passages in his later operas require that note; it was Wagner who introduced the idea of the low A extension.

• 5. Stravinsky's High Note

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  Igor Stravinsky's opening solo in The Rite of Spring pushed the bassoon into its highest available register to mimic the Ukrainian folk flute called the Dentsivka. That solo ascends to D5, already near the edge of what most writing asks of the instrument. Ravel's Piano Concerto goes a step further, calling for E5. Notes above that range exist but are seldom written, partly because they are difficult to produce reliably and partly because they sound much like the same pitches on the cor anglais, which can reach them with far less effort.

  The 20th century saw the bassoon become a vehicle for extended technique. Luciano Berio's Sequenza XII demanded microtonal fingerings, glissandos, and timbral trills. Bruno Bartolozzi's Concertazioni incorporated double and triple tonguing, flutter-tonguing, multiphonics, quarter-tones, and even singing. Peter Schickele's Sonata Abassoonata required the bassoonist to function as both musician and actor.

  Orchestral practice settled into groups of three or four bassoonists, with the fourth typically covering the contrabassoon as well. At the same time, broadcasting and recording opened new opportunities from the mid-20th century onward, while gradually reducing demand for live performances. Composers including John Williams with Five Sacred Trees and André Previn with his Sonata for bassoon and piano continued to add to a solo repertoire that now also includes bassoon quartets, such as Daniel Dorff's It Takes Four to Tango.

• 6. Bassoon in Jazz and Pop

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  Garvin Bushell was among the first to bring the bassoon into jazz, incorporating it into his performances in the 1920s. The instrument appeared in Paul Whiteman's group and in the unusual octets of Alec Wilder before fading as symphonic jazz lost popularity. The 1960s brought a revival: Yusef Lateef used it as part of a six-man horn section on The Centaur and the Phoenix in 1960, and Chick Corea employed it alongside flautist Hubert Laws.

  In pop music, the 1960s generated a cluster of hits featuring the instrument. Charles R. Sirard played bassoon on "The Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. It appeared in "Jennifer Juniper" by Donovan, the "59th Street Bridge Song" by Harpers Bizarre, and The New Vaudeville Band's "Winchester Cathedral." From 1974 to 1978, Lindsay Cooper played bassoon in the British avant-garde band Henry Cow. Brian Gulland played it in the British medieval-progressive rock band Gryphon during the 1970s. Fiona Apple featured it on the opening track of her 2004 album Extraordinary Machine.

  In 2016, UK grime artist Stormzy included bassoon on his album Gang Signs and Prayers, with UK bassoonist Louise Watson playing on the tracks "Cold" and "Mr Skeng." These New Puritans's 2010 album Hidden made extensive use of the instrument, with principal songwriter Jack Barnett describing himself as "writing a lot of music for bassoon" ahead of the recording. The rock band Better Than Ezra took their name from a line in Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in which Hemingway comments that enduring a talkative companion is still better than Ezra Pound learning to play the bassoon.

• 7. The Reed and the Player

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  Modern bassoon reeds are made from Arundo donax cane, and advanced players typically make their own. The process begins by splitting a length of tube cane into three or four pieces. The cane is gouged, shaped, profiled, soaked, and folded before brass wire is bound onto the bark portion in one, two, or three coils. A heated steel mandrel pressed into the cane causes it to permanently assume the correct conical shape. The blades above the first wire end up roughly 27-30 mm long once the tip is cut and beveled. The lower portion is sealed with a nitrocellulose cement such as Duco, or with hot glue, epoxy, or heat shrink wrap, and wrapped in thread. That wrapping is sometimes called the "Turk's head" and acts as a handle when inserting the reed onto the bocal.

  Learning the bassoon means mastering a fingering system that varies between players more than on any other orchestral woodwind. The left thumb alone operates nine keys; the right thumb operates four, including the large circular "pancake key" held down for all notes from E2 down to B1. A technique unique to the bassoon called flicking requires the left thumb to momentarily press the high A, C, and D keys at the beginning of certain middle-register notes to prevent cracking. The whisper key, also operated by the left thumb, is held down continuously for notes between F2 and G3.

  Cost and reed availability make the bassoon harder to take up than most woodwinds. In North America, students typically start on another reed instrument such as clarinet or saxophone before attempting the bassoon. Gustav Mahler is among the composers who later required the instrument to reach the low A, a note that demands a special bell extension and introduces significant tuning complications throughout the lower register.