Ken Munday, principal bassoonist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, balances his on one thigh using a Dutch-made device, while most of his compatriots, he says, 'sit on a strap that is like a belt with a hook on the bottom, to hold it up.' But apart from their instrument's physical challenges, bassoonists face what you might almost call an emotional hurdle: contending with obscurity.Īs Munday puts it: 'Being a bassoon player and the subject of investigation is like being one of those bottom feeders in a Jacques Cousteau special. Says Rose Corrigan, principal bassoonist with the Pacific Symphony and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra: 'Your left thumb alone has nine different functions.'īassoons weigh about 7 1/2 pounds. Eventually, metal keys were added, so your finger can cover up a hole that is very far away.'

They come to the outside where your fingers can reach, and they go to the inside at the place that makes the correct note. When it came to the bassoon, though, 'because the tube is so long, the holes would be farther apart than the fingers can reach, so instrument makers drilled the holes at an angle. John Steinmetz, a founding member of the local chamber group Xtet and principal bassoonist with Los Angeles Opera, explains: 'Sometime in prehistory, human beings figured out that if you drilled holes along a tube and then covered up all those holes with your fingers, you could get the sound of the complete tube.' Conversely, the fewer holes that were covered, the higher-pitched the result. When taken apart, the whole thing has five sections. It's a double-reed, like the oboe and the English horn, but its reed is attached to a long, curved stem, which is attached in turn to an 8-foot-or-so tube folded back on itself. It's the ungainly woodwind whose top you can glimpse sticking above the heads of most musicians in the orchestra (which typically has four bassoons) and is rimmed in metal or white. Nothing else resembles the bassoon either. It's a great noise - nothing else makes that noise.' It has the medieval aroma - like the days when everything used to sound like that….

The bassoon, elusive but essential, gives its fellow woodwinds a bracing backbone.įrank ZAPPA once wrote, 'The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments.

Happy farmer basoon