Bassoon as a double

ByBret Pimentel

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I’d like to say up front that I really love the bassoon. I do.

The bassoon was the last of the major woodwinds that I added to my arsenal. Looking at it from a strictly pragmatic standpoint, I think that was the right choice for me, and would be for most doublers. Let’s face it: when it comes down to time and money, for woodwind doublers, the bassoon demands a lot of both and doesn’t always return a lot of either.

Bassoons are tremendously expensive. A really playable intermediate-level instrument, used, might cost $5000. Compare this to maybe $500 for a clarinet of similar quality. And the bassoons played by top professionals might run more than $30,000. Sure, a serious violin can cost several times that amount, but then again you can double on a high-quality flute, oboe, clarinet, and a saxophone or two all for less than the cost of a true professional bassoon.

The bassoon presents some unique challenges to the woodwind player. Its keywork is labyrinthine, its tone and pitch are highly flexible, it uses bass and tenor clefs (all the other woodwinds use treble only), and it uses fussy and delicate double reeds (though not so fussy and delicate as oboe reeds). None of these challenges is insurmountable, but they are significant.

And the gig situation for bassoon doublers is relatively bleak. Single reeds and flute are the bread and butter of most doublers, and a good oboe/EH specialist with decent single reeds can be in high demand, too. For the bassoonist, the best bet is to become a low reeds specialist, with excellent bassoon, bass clarinet, and baritone saxophone skills. Note that these again are all seriously expensive instruments. And if you do a lot of your playing at smaller venues, like I do, then the low reed book is usually the first thing to get cut when the budget or orchestra pit are too small to accommodate a full woodwind section.

Are there reasons to play the bassoon as a woodwind doubler? Absolutely. It’s a deeply rewarding instrument to play (if not so much in the monetary sense); it has a rich repertoire, a huge sonic range, and a noble history. And if you are committed enough to learn to play it really well, you may find that you are in demand after all, perhaps not so much for doubling gigs but simply as a serious bassoonist. There are a lot of really fine flutists and saxophonists out there, and bassoonists of equivalent skill are a relatively rare breed.

I’d like to offer a few words of advice to (1) woodwind doublers who are considering picking up the bassoon, and to (2) fine bassoonists who are thinking about getting into woodwind doubling.

  1. For woodwind doublers
    • Don’t scrimp too much, but don’t take out a second mortgage either (yet). You don’t need a pre-war Heckel like the players in a top orchestra. At least not at this point. But you do need an instrument that plays in tune and with consistent tone without undue effort. The 200-series instruments by Fox are excellent, and may be all the bassoon you will ever need. They cost maybe twice as much new as a pro-level clarinet or saxophone.
    • Get some lessons. Even if it’s just a few. The bassoon is a different animal than the other woodwinds. There are some secrets you will need to learn before you will sound like the real thing. Fingering the bassoon is more art than science.
    • Get a good reed source. If you took the previous tip seriously, then you’re already set. The best way to get reeds (other than learning, painstakingly, to make your own) is to buy them face-to-face from a real live bassoonist. By “best,” I mean you will get reeds that are adjusted for your climate, embouchure, and instrument, and probably cheaper than ordering from a reedmaker on the Internet. Mass-produced reeds from your neighborhood music store are a waste of money for someone who already has an ear for pitch and tone.
    • Don’t skip the basics. The big Weissenborn book is a good place to start. Really practice all the “easy” stuff at the beginning. Then maybe jump over to Oubradous for some serious scale and arpeggio work, and then come back to the Weissenborn book to play the Milde studies. The bassoon’s technique is just too complicated and nuanced to jump into gigs with a fingering chart and a hopeful expression.
  2. For bassoonists
    • Your quickest and easiest way to improve your employability through doubling is as a bassoon specialist with strong bass clarinet and baritone saxophone. I would suggest buying a high-quality student model clarinet and alto saxophone and taking a serious approach to learning them (lessons, practice time, etc.) while you save your pennies for a nice baritone saxophone and bass clarinet. A good intermediate-level baritone saxophone like the Yamaha 50-series will serve you well. If you’re going to be serious about low reeds, spring for a low A instrument. There are also decent intermediate bass clarinets to be had, but no good tried-and-true intermediate models with range to low C, so you may need to bite the bullet and get a really professional-level bass clarinet.
    • If you are independently wealthy and enjoy heavy lifting, consider ultimately expanding to bass saxophone and the contrabass clarinets, and tie up every low reeds gig for miles around. Or if your budget and trunk space are a little tighter, you can keep working on clarinet and higher saxophones, and eventually add flute and piccolo.
    • Become a jazz lover. In woodwind doubling situations, you will need to be prepared to play at least a semi-convincing Broadway-jazz style on single reeds. Most bassoonists don’t have real background in that stuff; do some serious listening or maybe take a few lessons with a local saxophonist to pick up some of the nuances of articulation and inflection.

Good luck!

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  • Achieving an ideal tone

    ByBret Pimentel

    A lot of the questions people have about woodwind playing center on tone: how can I get a better tone? a darker tone? a tone like _____’s? There’s not a lot of clarity on this, for a few reasons:

    • Firstly, of course, “good” tone is subjective, and trying to communicate clearly about tone in more dispassionate terms is problematic due to inconsistent vocabulary.
    • Tone is made from a recipe of factors, so it’s hard to isolate individual ones. Will adding another egg improve your cake? Depends on what else is in it. Will a certain warm-up exercise or piece of equipment have a specific effect on your tone? Depends on what other equipment and playing techniques you are using.
    • Much of what affects tone is difficult or impossible to observe and measure.

    Let’s look at the physical factors that influence tone:

    • Yes, of course, equipment. It’s axiomatic in woodwind playing that your equipment does affect your tone, but not as much as you affect your tone. Still, your particular combination of headjoint, reed, mouthpiece, ligature, barrel, bocal, instrument, and various other parts and accessories does influence in some way the sound that you make. Equipment of good design and construction, and within typical parameters, will contribute to an essentially characteristic tone quality. (By characteristic I mean easily identifiable as a specific instrument by someone with a musically-educated ear.)
    • Basic woodwind-playing techniques, including most notably breath support, voicing, and embouchure. Assuming these are well-trained, they also contribute to a characteristic tone quality.
    • Some subtle aspects of those woodwind-playing techniques that are hard to pin down. These small things determine how the tone fits into the larger world of characteristic tone qualities, usually described poorly in vague terms like “good” or “pure” or “rich” or “buttery” or “vocal.” For example, an oboist’s embouchure puts different pressures on different parts of the reed. Those pressures can be adjusted very subtly using the small and flexible muscles of the embouchure, but most oboists probably aren’t very aware of exactly what adjustments they are making (though they may know what it feels like). Most are also not very capable of passing that wisdom (i.e. a feeling) along to a student or colleague. Some of them can be described in too-general terms (“bring the corners of your mouth in more”), or can be evoked with spotty accuracy through metaphor or through tone exercises.
    photo, Tom Page
    photo, Tom Page

    So, how do you ever develop a tone that is characteristic, personal, and beautiful?

    • Use appropriate equipment.
    • Employ solid fundamental woodwind-playing techniques.
    • Listen frequently, widely, and at length to good music, particularly on your instrument, to develop a tone concept—an aural impression of your ideal tone. In early stages, that might be based on how deeply you have absorbed the sound of a favorite musician, perhaps your teacher. In later stages, it might be a sort of composite of your favorite aspects of many tones that you have internalized, perhaps even things that inspired you about a performance on an instrument other than your own (or a voice). Ultimately, it might be a tone that you have never heard before, but which you can imagine.

    Here’s why tone concept is so crucial:

    All those subtleties of woodwind technique that affect tone, the ones that are so hard to understand and communicate? You can find them with patient and dedicated practice, if you know what you are listening for. As you have already discovered, your tone tends to change from day to day. This inconsistency can be a problem, but can also be a way of stumbling, even subconsciously, onto something positive. (When it’s a conscious process, your thought might be, “when I hold my embouchure this way, I get a sound that is more _____.”) Additionally, a clear tone concept may aid you in intuitively pursuing it; you already use the muscles of breathing, voicing, and embouchure to intuitively produce a huge and subtly-differentiated set of speech sounds, and for most of those you would be hard-pressed to explain how you make them. If you get comfortable and familiar enough with your instrument through years of practice, you can begin to tap into that intuitive control, but again: only if you know what sound you want to make.

    An ideal tone is a lifelong pursuit—invest in yours by listening and practicing daily.

  • Quick quote: woodwind doubling in the 17th and 18th centuries

    ByBret Pimentel

    From Bruce Haynes’s The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy, Oxford University Press, 2001:

    In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a wind player was an hautboist who might by circumstance be led into a concentration on some other type of instrument. The modern idea of a musician who would limit himself to one instrument, and become a virtuoso on it, took hold at the Dresden court at about the beginning of the eighteenth century, perhaps as a result of the numerous Italian musicians who worked there, and who tended to specialize. But it remained unusual in Germany for some time.

    More insight from the footnotes:

    Based on archival evidence, Oleskiewicz (1998: 49) believes woodwind doubling ‘completely disappeared sometime between 1717 and 1719.’

    And:

    There is evidence that hautboy players in bands in the early 18th c. could not necessarily switch to bassoon.

  • Voicing: stable vs. flexible

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    I have discussed here previously the importance of proper voicing for woodwind instruments. In a nutshell, voicing is the configuration of the oral cavity, manipulated by moving the back of the tongue.

    There seems to be some debate about voicing: is it something static, or something that changes from note to note? I find that the answer is, sort of, both.

    photo, stonelucifer
    photo, stonelucifer

    For beginning woodwind players, tone, intonation, and response (virtually every aspect of tone production) can be improved by habituating a single, stable, “correct” voicing. When this is accomplished, an ideal woodwind instrument, which of course does not exist, would play perfectly in tune, with perfectly consistent tone from note to note, and with perfectly even and reliable response.

    An instrument that is merely good will do these things well, but imperfectly. A more advanced musician can use small and temporary voicing adjustments to improve individual notes by altering their pitch, tone, or responsiveness. Doing this requires a “stable” voicing as a stepping-off point, fine control of the mechanics of voicing, and an ear trained to hear notes that are out of tune, uncharacteristic in tone, or problematic response-wise.

    So, in general, when working with beginning students or others with significant tone production issues, the goal is to work toward a stable voicing that stays the same from note to note, but with more advanced students the goal is to learn to adjust the voicing ever so slightly to improve each note as needed.

  • Pedagogical recipes

    ByBret Pimentel

    I want to follow up on something I touched on in my last post. I described in that post how I had my woodwind methods class evaluate some online pedagogical resources, and mentioned that I had them compare the information found online to the information presented in class. My idea was to prepare them to deal with conflicting information, which will be part of their reality as public school band directors.

    Woodwind pedagogy, unfortunately, is a mishmash of contradictory ideas. This is supported by a culture of hero worship of certain teachers and performers, a permissive editorial process for publishing pedagogical materials (increasingly so with the rise of the internet), and an attitude that music is not subject to scientific method.

    When conflicts exist between one school of thought and another, in some cases that is because one or both sides is incorrect. In other cases the problem is a communication failure: both sides are applying the same techniques in the same way, but describing them poorly (or at least differently). But I think there are other cases where the difference can be attributed to what I think of as different “recipes.”

    photo, Sarah Horrigan
    photo, Sarah Horrigan

    There are many ways to make a chocolate cake. Some cake recipes might be objectively better than others by some measure or another. Some might produce results that are generally satisfactory but especially suited to certain tastes. And in some cases, two different recipes might produce results that are very similar. In those cases, the way the ingredients and techniques balance is significant: one recipe might call for two eggs instead of three, but has more of another ingredient that makes up the difference, or a difference in baking time and temperature.

    I think a similar thing can happen with “recipes” for woodwind playing. Equipment preferences are a fairly clear example: one clarinet teacher might favor very stiff reeds, while another prefers softer ones. Both might produce excellent results, so long as they are balanced properly—the first teacher probably balances stiffer reeds against mouthpieces with a more closed tip, and the other might use softer reeds with more open mouthpieces. One oboe teacher might clip his reeds to 70mm while another clips hers to 69.5mm, but they probably balance this with narrower or wider shaper tips, or tweaks to any of a dozen other variables.

    Playing techniques are a little more abstract and complicated to separate out, but I think the same concept applies. One bassoon teacher might encourage some jaw movement when articulating lower notes, while another teaches a more stable embouchure, but it’s always more complicated than that: the technique’s usefulness and effectiveness has to be evaluated in the context of each teacher’s approach to breath support, voicing, embouchure, equipment, and more.

    The idea that I wanted to bring across to my class is that, for band directors or other musicians and music educators who might not be specialists in each of the woodwind instruments, it is important to beware little pedagogical proverbs taken out of context. Something like “firm up your embouchure” or “use a stiffer reed” or “use the alternate F-sharp” can seem like a quick and digestible solution, but can’t be applied casually and without understanding of the larger picture.

  • A woodwind player’s introduction to: Native American flutes

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    • It is a duct- or fipple-type flute, which means it easily produces sound, like a recorder or pennywhistle, though the construction is different.
    • Many of the commercially-available flutes are labeled as Native-American-“style” flutes, which has to do with US laws about who can and can’t sell products as “Native American.”
    • Many Native American “flutes” are sold as decorative or souvenir items, and not suitable for serious playing. My best recommendation is for the Butch Hall “concert” flutes (which I’ve reviewed previously). They are relatively simple in appearance (though beautifully crafted); some other makers’ flutes are highly-decorated, which does not guarantee high instrument quality.
    • Modern NAFs generally have five or six finger holes. The five-holed flutes usually produce a minor pentatonic scale, and the six-holed ones add an additional note (the major sixth scale degree) plus some additional possibilities for cross-fingerings. Playing chromatically requires skillful half-holing in addition to cross fingerings, and these instruments really are better suited to mostly-pentatonic-type melodies. Most high-quality flutes are capable of playing over one octave but less than two.
    • F-sharp minor and G-minor are common keys for solo playing, though many keys are available. If you need to play with Western-tuned instruments, you may wish to double-check before purchasing that a flute is tuned to your preferred pitch standard, as they are not tunable.
    • There’s no surviving authentic ancient repertoire for these instruments; they are thought to have been mostly used for improvisation. (Prior to the influence of Western musicians, these instruments likely did not adhere to Western-type scales anyway; some were built with hole spacing based on the player’s hand size.) There is some modern (post-1970) repertoire for the instrument, most notably the compositions of R. Carlos Nakai (who is also probably the modern instrument’s best-known performer; also check out Grammy winner Mary Youngblood).
    • There is some consensus for notating NAFs in the key of written F-sharp minor, and treating flutes in other keys as transposing. Nakai uses a kind of tablature notation system that closely resembles this, but is intended to use lines and spaces on a Western staff to express fingerings rather than pitches, so it can be used to notate for flutes with atypical tunings.
    • The Nakai school of playing often incorporates bird- and animal-like sounds, including chirps at the beginnings and ends of notes produced by sudden bursts of air. (The required airflow for “standard” tone is low compared to modern Western woodwinds.) Vibrato, trills and tremolos, double- or flutter-tonguing, pitch inflections and portamenti, and grace notes are also common. Digital delay effects are commonly used to suggest the flute echoing against canyon walls.
    • The only traditional ensemble for a NAF is pairing with a Native American drum, but NAFs are commonly played solo, or in New-Age-type settings.
    • Native American flutes, like most fipple flutes, generally respond well to a low, open voicing, though the tone aesthetic is broad enough to potentially accommodate other approaches.

  • What’s in a name? What “doublers” call themselves, part II

    ByBret Pimentel

    In my last post, I listed some alternate titles for “woodwind doubler.” Here are my thoughts on some of them. Read More “What’s in a name? What “doublers” call themselves, part II”

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