The bassoon, constructed in three parts, started being made in the mid-seventeenth century, perhaps in France in imitation of the flute and oboe. Built with three keys by the Denners of Nuremberg, the new instrument allowed greater virtuosity in the player than the one-piece curtal and dulcian, which began to decline in favour of the bassoon ...
Attempts were made in the nineteenth century to turn the bassoon into a metal instrument: Charles and Adolphe Sax experimented with brass bassoons and the latter patented such an instrument, with 24 keys, in 1851. There were rival arrangements of keys (which implied different ways of fingering) available in the nineteenth century. There continue to be French and German ...
of separate pieces of wood, which were then bound together, giving rise to the term ‘fagot’ because of its resemblance to a bundle of wood. Development of the Bassoon The dulcian was gradually developed over the ensuing centuries. Keys were added, the distribution and size of finger holes was experimented with, the wood altered, the range ...
replacing the older instrument in the second half of the seventeenth century in military bands and church ensembles. It was also used as a soloist in orchestras. Similarly, the bassoon, which been around in guises such as the curtal, the bombard and the dulcian, became a regular member of the orchestra, doubling the bass line in ...
and a single beating reed. Instead of being a kind of flattened drinking straw wedged on to a thin metal tube, as in the case of the oboe and bassoon, it is more like a thin spatula tied on to an open-topped recorder mouthpiece. A single-reed woodwind instrument called the chalumeau had evolved in the seventeenth century, possibly ...
, Turkish mey, Mongolian guan, Chinese kuan or guanzi, and a characteristic instrument of gagaku (Japanese court music), the bamboo hichiriki. Introduction | Woodwind Instruments Instruments | Bassoon | Woodwind ...
perhaps most famously of all, it depicts the swan in Sibelius’s ‘Swan of Tuonela’, one of the Lemminkäinen legends. Styles & Forms | Late Romantic | Classical Instruments | Bassoon | Late Romantic | Classical ...
the Baroque string orchestra in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Composers such as George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) might reinforce the bass line with a bassoon, give solo parts to oboes, flutes and horns, and use timpani and trumpets to flesh out tutti sections. By around 1770, pairs of oboes, bassoons ...
fitted into the instrument and enabled it to be played at different pitches – pitch varied from region to region. Styles & Forms | Early Baroque | Classical Instruments | Bassoon | Early Baroque | Classical ...
‘damper’ effect, which modern pianos preserve (nicknamed the ‘soft pedal’), there were pedals or stops to operate drums, triangles, bells and cymbals, and there were even bassoon, harpsichord and buzzer stops. Later makers abandoned these and concentrated instead on producing fortepianos that possessed two qualities: a wider compass and greater dynamic breadth. The fortepiano was found ...
The heckelphone was developed by William Heckel after he heard from Wagner in 1879 that the orchestra lacked a powerful baritone double-reed instrument. Accordingly, he experimented with the oboe family and produced the first heckelphone in 1904. Built in three sections, it has a wider bore than the oboe, and is played using a bassoon-type reed mounted on ...
oboe in the eighteenth century, it was in the 1820s that a firm called Tribert began manufacturing the modern instrument. The tube was folded up like that of a bassoon, and the first straight baritone oboe was produced by F. Lore in 1889. Like the English horn, its reed is carried on a curved metal crook. Styles & ...
in Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie and Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine. Honegger, who wrote for it in Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, recommended that it should replace the double bassoon! Another electronic keyboard was developed by Brune Helberger: a first version was built in 1936 and a second in 1947. With a seven-octave range, this had two manuals ...
The organ is an instrument of extremes – the biggest, the loudest, the lowest, the highest, the oldest, the newest and the most complex, it is also among the smallest, the most intimate, the most modest, and the simplest. Organ Extremes The aptly named portative organ – much played from the twelfth ...
wind instruments. Some rackets were made of hard wood, others of ivory. Further double-reed instruments from the Renaissance include the dulcian and the curtal. An early version of the bassoon, the dulcian was made in one piece rather than in the separable three of the later bassoon. ‘Curtal’ was the name normally used in England for both dulcian and ...
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