Never cry wolf

The film adaptation of Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf features the bassoon prominently. This is a fictive addition by the filmmakers, as Mowat never mentions a bassoon, but it's a small change to an already somewhat fictional book, and it makes us bassoonists happy. Here's one of the appearances of the bassoon:



Wow, I can't sound like that in my living room, much less outside in the snow. Still, gorgeous playing --- David Wells says  it's Rufus Oliver of the SF Opera. David also writes quite a bit more about the movie. There's also a discussion of it on the excellent and new-to-me blog, Dr. Pierce's Bassoon Studio.

How to annoy the bassoonist

It's totally unclear to me how this is working, exactly. With the valve slides gone, we're left with a fairly short, cylindrical bore. Why does that sound anything like a bassoon? Hm.

And, for those who'd like to sing along, here are the lyrics:

"I... am not an english horn. // I am not an english horn, I cannot play so high // I am not an english horn..."

The Savary bassoon

The Savary Bassoon refers to instruments made by the Parisian maker Jean-Nicolas Savary. His dates are 1768-1853, so I guess these would count as classical or early romantic instruments, coming just before the changes of Heckel and Almenrader. The photo above shows an x-ray of the wing joint of one of the remaining examples. I love this image: you can see the long tone holes that give the bassoon its unique sound, as well as the subtle changes in the taper of the main bore that the maker used to balance various characteristics.

There's been  a recent effort to reconstruct one of these instruments, documented in the video below. I'm not a big fan of calling anything the "Stradavarius of X", unless X is a violin, but the instrument has a gorgeous sound, quite different from the modern bassoon.