The present research leads to establishing a connection between the approach to musical innovations developed in the nineteenth century and the complex process the bassoon underwent, as an instrument, in that same period. This has shown that, apart from the difficulties involved in defining a theoretical procedure, there is also a gap in the research on instrument developments. In order to understand how the bassoon’s transformations have been understood throughout history, it becomes necessary to examine research on this process carried out in other instruments, as well as the organological research devoted to the bassoon.
The final chapters in Dolmetsch’s book are devoted to describing early instruments. He intends to recover them for their use, as he did as a performer with violas, keyboards and recorders. When he has to talk about wind instruments, he points out that those instruments have not yet been recovered, except for the recorder and the eighteenth century one-keyed flute (Dolmetsch 1915: 457).
It is worth considering an important difference between Dolmetsch and other subsequent publications. In 1915 restoring early music with its corresponding instrument and restoring an accurate way of playing was considered as a whole. The next generation, however, must establish rules for a new practice in order to apply them to a repertoire that already has a different performance. This shift, that marks an important difference between generations, is visible in the foreword to the 1946 second edition of Dolmetsch’s book. Written by his son Carl, historical performance is associated to the recovering of original instruments in a way it had not been seen before.
Thanks to the labours of Arnold Dolmetsch and his followers, the value and interest of the music of past centuries performed on the instruments for which it was written, with the correct interpretation, is today generally recognized.
(Dolmetsch 1946: iii)
Some authors like Dart or Donington strongly call for the need to use period instruments in order to find the correct early music performance. For this reason, since the 1960s, many works have been published dealing with keyboard and string instruments technique from a specific period, like those
already mentioned by Badura-Skoda or Boyden and many others. However, historical woodwind instruments revival has followed a different approach.
While in the other cases historical technique has come together with the rescued instrument, woodwind literature has focused, almost exclusively on organology, the historical evolution of the instrument, and the repertoire.
One possible reason for this lack of studies on the historical performance of woodwind instruments may be due to the fact that the revival of these historical instruments developed later than the keyboard or string instruments revival. Historical reed instrument interest starts to develop mainly in the 1960s. At that time, string and keyboard instruments had already good instrument copies; therefore, research could be done on how to play them. On the other hand, the main problem woodwind performers of the 1960s had to deal with was to find a good original in order to restore it or to make a copy of it. This is the reason why the scarce literature currently available focuses on organology; moreover, a systematic study of the historical technique on woodwind instruments has not yet started.
However, something that has in a particular way influenced the development of the literature on historical technique in wind instruments in general, and particularly on the bassoon. This is related to the first books devoted to the topic. At the same time as Dolmetsch promoted the research on historical keyboards or string instruments at the beginning of the twentieth century, his contemporary, Francis William Galpin (1858-1945), held a similar position influencing subsequent wind instrument research.
However, there is an important difference between both authors. While Dolmetsch was a performer himself, Galpin was mainly an amateur musician and instrument collector. Because of this, his research deals with organology and not so much with performance practice, like the 1910 Old English Instruments of Music: Their History and Character.
His influence endured for years, since The Galpin Society was founded after his death in 1946. Among the founding members of the society we can find the key writers of books on the history of wind instruments that contain chapters or monographs devoted to the bassoon. As an example, the table below illustrates a relationship between the main founding members of The Galpin Society and their main publications during the 1950s and 1960s with their reprints.
History and State of the Art 35
Founding member Selected publications
Anthony Baines (1912-1997) Woodwind Instruments and their History (1957, 3/1967; 1991)
Philip Bate (1909-1999) The Oboe: An Outline of its History, Development and Construction (1956, 3/1975)
Robert Donington (1907-1990) The Interpretation of Early Music (1963, 4/1989) Eric Halfpenny (1906-1979) Concise Encyclopaedia of Antiques (1955) Lyndesay Langwill
(1897-1983)
The Bassoon and Double Bassoon (1948) The Bassoon and Contrabassoon7 (1965) An Index of Musical Wind-instrument Makers (1960, 6/1980, rev. 7/1993 by W. Waterhouse as The New Langwill Index: A Dictionary of Musical Wind-instrument Makers and Inventors
[Waterhouse-LangwillI]).
Table 1.1. Founding members of The Galpin Society and their relevant publications including some reference to the bassoon.
These publications have become benchmarks in woodwind instrument literature and particularly bassoon literature. From those, the books by Baines and Langwill stand out; although they mainly focus on describing the instrument rather than on performance issues. Subsequent books on the bassoon share with the first titles a special interest in the bassoon’s technical and mechanical development. That is the case of several publications of the early 1980s, such as Will Jansen’s The Bassoon: Its History, Construction, Makers, Players, and Musicians (1981) or Gunther Joppig’s Oboe und Fagott: Ihre Geschichte, ihre Nebeninstrumenten und ihre Musik (1981).
Furthermore; over the years, the interest in the organology of the bassoon has not faded away even in later publications, such as William Waterhouse’s The bassoon (2003), Maarten Vonk’s A Bundle of Joy (2007), Augustin Tiffou’s Le Basson en France au XIX siècle (2010), Sebastian Werr’s Geschichte des Fagotts (2011), or James Kopp’s The Bassoon (2012), among others.
However, it becomes necessary to give further explanations about the starting point of this research. Through the dissertation the instrument and
7 Despite of their similar title, The Bassoon and Double Bassoon and The Bassoon and Contrabassoon are quite different kinds of publications. The first one can be seen as a handbook or a basic approach to the bassoon with only 40 pages, while Langwills’ book published in 1965 gains in extension and complexity.
its performers are treated together as part of the complex process of performance practice in the first half of the nineteenth century.
As happened with the rest of wind instruments, during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, the bassoon goes through several mechanical and technical developments, all of which have been studied to some extent in the literature above mentioned. However, due to the emphasis placed on performance in this dissertation, those technical developments are shown here as a complex process in which performers interact with instrument makers.
That is to say, the radical transformations of the bassoon are not considered just as pure mechanical changes, treated as if they themselves were the final goal, or the consequence of the Industrial Revolution in wind instruments. On the contrary, the starting point in this dissertation is the past of the bassoon within its historical context; therefore, it is not enough to analyse the mechanical changes of the instrument described in the above mentioned books.
Historically, the bassoon had a specific function as an accompanying instrument integrated in the basso continuo in the Baroque period8. Due to several reasons—some of them are treated explicitly, while others appear implicitly in historical sources—in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, the bassoon starts to acquire a solo function, especially visible in the orchestra.
The interest of the present research is to find out how the performer faced those changes. Moreover; to what extent is it possible to confirm the way in which those changes were received or rejected in a period with no recorded sound? Although this aspect has not been deeply analysed in modern research, there are plenty of historical sources that allow us to guide the hypothesis.
8 Not meaning there is no solo literature at all (i.e. Vivaldi has 39 bassoon Concertos).
[37]
Chapter 2