Bassoon from the musical instrument collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Biebrich, on the Rhine, 1831. Carl Almenräder is getting on for forty-five, plays the bassoon in the court orchestra of the Dukes of Nassau, and eight years earlier published a treatise on how to correct the instrument’s intonation, its response and the strain on the fingers. That year he opens a workshop with a young man not yet twenty, Johann Adam Heckel. The young man’s surname is still engraved on many of the most sought-after bassoons in the world, and the system worked out in that workshop became, in the twentieth century, the standard of almost every orchestra, France aside. One thing, though, neither of them could touch: the length of the tube.
A modern bassoon, stood upright, is a little over 1.3 metres tall. The tube inside it measures about two and a half. The Metropolitan Museum in New York, which holds one built by the Heckel firm in 1932, lists both figures side by side: 1,330 millimetres from end to end, 2,585 millimetres of tubing. The path of the air is a hairpin. It descends from the bocal, the metal tube onto which the reed is fitted, along the wing joint; reaches the bottom of the boot joint, where a U-bend sends it back up; climbs the long joint and leaves through the bell, level with the player’s head. Hence the Italian name: fagotto, a bundle of firewood.
It is often said to be the longest tube in the orchestra. It is not. A tenor trombone has about 2.7 metres, a horn in F between 3.6 and 3.7, a contrabass tuba in B flat about 5.5. And the contrabassoon, which sits next to the bassoon, also reaches about 5.5 metres, folded over on itself several times. The bassoon wins only among the woodwinds of the standard row: flute, oboe, clarinet and itself. But the comparison with the brass is misleading, because a brass instrument folds its tube and that is all. The notes are changed by the lips, the valves, the slide. A woodwind has to do one thing more: open holes along the bore, exactly where the acoustics demand them, and bring them within reach of ten fingers.
That is the bassoon’s real problem, and it has carried it since the sixteenth century. Among its ancestors is the bass bombard, a straight tube taller than a man, tiring to hold and to play. The solution was to carve, from a single block of maple, two conical channels side by side, joined at the bottom. The dulcian was born, which flourished between 1550 and 1700 and which in Italy, already by the end of the century, Lodovico Zacconi called fagotto chorista. The tube had been halved in height, but the holes were still spread along a very long path, and a human hand reaches no further than a span.
The makers answered with a trick of the drill. The walls of the bassoon are unusually thick, especially in the wing joint, which takes its name precisely from that lateral swelling of wood. Inside that thickness the holes are not bored straight but at a slant: on the inside they open at the exact point of the bore that the sound requires, on the outside they emerge where the fingertip can reach. The inner channel, for that matter, is very narrow: about four millimetres at the top, where the air enters, and some forty at the bottom of the bell. Everything else is done by the keys. The German system of today counts between twenty-four and twenty-seven of them, and leaves only five open holes under the fingers. Almenräder’s work, in 1823 and then at Biebrich, was precisely this: redistributing holes and levers on a tube that physics would not let him shorten.
The bill comes due in the lowest note. The bassoon’s low B flat sits a tone below the cello’s deepest string, and to get it the player closes everything, holes and keys. The air then travels the whole hairpin, down to the boot and back up again, two and a half metres of wood to emerge at the top, not far from the mouth that blew it.