Instrument
Bassoon
A double-reed woodwind pitched an octave and more below the oboe.
The bassoon is the woodwind family's bass voice, sharing the oboe's double-reed mechanism but pitched far lower - low enough that its roughly eight feet of tubing has to be doubled back on itself to keep the instrument a manageable size to hold and play. In Italian it's the fagotto, a "bundle of sticks," which is roughly what it looks like.
How it's built and played
Structurally, the bassoon is built in four detachable sections - the wing joint, boot joint, long joint, and bell - a design that lets its folded tubing (and the roughly 20-plus tone holes and keys covering it) be manufactured and repaired in manageable pieces rather than as one unwieldy tube. The double reed sits on the end of a thin, curved metal tube called the bocal, and the player supports the instrument with a strap or seat strap. Like oboists, bassoonists usually make and adjust their own reeds.
Among orchestral instruments its range is unusually wide, running from a deep bass register up into a reedy tenor range, which is part of why composers can use it as both harmonic foundation and solo voice within the same piece.
Two characters
Its tone can shift character dramatically depending on register and context: reedy and somewhat comic in its middle range (composers have long exploited this for lighthearted or grotesque effect), but warm and genuinely lyrical lower down, capable of real melodic expressiveness rather than purely harmonic support. Paul Dukas made the bassoons the marching broomsticks of The Sorcerer's Apprentice; Tchaikovsky gave the bassoon the dark, brooding opening of his "Pathétique" Symphony.
The contrabassoon
The bassoon's big brother, the contrabassoon, sounds an octave lower still, with over sixteen feet of tubing folded into a tall, heavy frame. It reaches some of the lowest notes in the orchestra - Beethoven used it in the finale of his Fifth Symphony, and Ravel gave it a grumbling solo as "the Beast" in his Mother Goose suite.
A short history
It descends from the Renaissance and early Baroque dulcian (also called the curtal), a simpler single-piece double-reed instrument with the same folded-bore idea, refined into something closer to the modern bassoon over the 18th century. In the Baroque orchestra it doubled the bass line, but composers soon gave it solos: Vivaldi wrote more than thirty bassoon concertos, and Mozart wrote his Bassoon Concerto at the age of eighteen.
Essential bassoon music
- Vivaldi - Bassoon Concertos.
- Mozart - Bassoon Concerto in B-flat (1774).
- Weber - Bassoon Concerto (1811).
- Dukas - The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1897).
- Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring (1913), the opening solo.
- Prokofiev - Peter and the Wolf, where the bassoon plays the grandfather.
Where to start listening: the opening bassoon solo of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, pushed into an unusually high, strained register, is one of the most famous (and most difficult) bassoon passages ever written. For its lighter, more comic side, the bassoon's role as the grandfather's grumbling theme in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf shows exactly the character composers reach for it to supply.