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A vision on the bassoon Road To Damascus...

Author: Terry Stibal
Date: 2007-01-31 16:48

One neat little thing that I never realized before two nights ago was that (for the most part) the bassoon's "scale" duplicates the clarinet's scale (when considering the middle register (on the faggott) and the chalmeau register (on the clarinet). As I had never really learned to "read" bass clef on sight (relying instead upon a "push the button, monkey!" sort of system, where I associated a fingering with a position on the bass staff without knowing the note name), this was a major breakthrough.

(This is what happens when you learn how to play something without a teacher's help. The fingering chart that I used had the notes on the staff, but no note names anywhere. And, I have never really mastered the "read it down a space or line" system, try as I may. In effect, I was playing (and pretty well, I might add) "by ear", much as Steve Allen used to be able to play the clarinet without knowing jack about reading sheet music.)

So, there I was, sitting on the couch, watching my son facing me as he fiddled around with the horn (on which I am now getting back up to speed for an upcoming musical doubling job) as his lithe fingers were running through chromatic sales and intervals remembered from his bassoon playing days in middle school and the first year of high school. (Once he started playing hockey at a high level (he was semi-pro for a year), and concurrently ran into the "You've got to be in the marching band" stuff of high school, that was the end for bassoon playing.)

As he was fiddling around on the horn, I asked him to sound and hold an "A" for me so I could check the five or six reeds we had on hand against an electronic tuner. While he was holding the note out, I clearly "saw" for the first time the appearance of his fingers on the horn and it hit me like a ton of bricks: "Hey, that's just like the chalmeau on a clarinet!" Obvious as hell perhaps once you think about it, but it had never occurred to me before (probably because I didn't really associate the note names with the fingering without thinking about it and thus getting distracted from the finger position on the horn).

Sometimes, it's the little things that trip you up. It's one of those simple little tricks (like the bass clef reading of C parts on Eb horns, and the miraculous Eb to Bb and Bb to Eb transpositions that are enabled by the clarinet's cylindrical bore and register key systems) that have helped me out as much as any twenty books of scale and etude studies. You just have to find out about them...

Terry L. Stibal

leader of Houston's Sounds Of The South Dance Orchestra
info@sotsdo.com

Post Edited (2007-01-31 16:50)

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