Klarinet Archive - Posting 000177.txt from 2005/11

From: Robert Howe <arehow@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Tchaik 6th bassoon versus bass clarinet
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 20:23:26 -0500

Friends and colleagues,

I just spent a half hour typing a learned letter, referencing several
sources, quoting from the literature, proving that Tchaikowsky wanted this
solo played on a muted bassoon (and renouncing an earlier statement of mine
from the Double Reed list). It disappeared somehow when I went to send it.
I am too tired to do it all over again.

Briefly, Rimsky's Orchestration text (Dover reprint page 21) shows beyond a
doubt that the bassoon was used muted for such passages. "Mutes deaden the
tone of oboes, Eng. horns and bassoons to such an extent that it is possible
to attain the extreme limit of pianissimo playing". What more compelling
statement could you ask for? Same decade, same town, as the Tchaik 6th.

And the woodwinds used in Czarist Russia were of German models, not French
as I have wrongly asserted (probably in the late 1990's, when I was even
stupider than I am now). I now have a Zimmerman bassoon from the Petrograd
Imperial Court (ca 1890) and I will have a bassoonist friend Do The
Experiment.

Playing it on Muted Bassoon is the CORRECT way to do it.

Robert Howe

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