Bassoon

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.

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.

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.