Historical Bassoon Reed-Making: The Missing Pieces

I. Introduction

A. Why making reeds in a historical manner is important.

1. Historical instruments were intended to be played with reeds made according to historical principles.

2. The vibratory system needs to be flexible. When the reed is made with modern techniques, the vibratory system is not flexible.

3. The historical reed system is a reed with a bassoon attached; the modern reed system is a bassoon with a reed attached.

B. What Makes a ≥Historical Bassoon Reed≤?

1. The gouge. Use of internal gouging or contrepente, where most of the work in reed-making is done on the interior of the reed (the gouge), with very little profiling and scraping.

2. The scrape. The profile or scrape is made so that there is a slight spine or arÍte down the center. There is a difference between the spine on a modern reed and that of a historical reed.

3. Shape of the tube at the first wire. The form of the tube at the first wire on historical reeds needs to be a relatively flat oval.

4. Shape or form of reed: tip width, width at first wire, shape of blade. Two basic shape/dimension designs appear most often:

a) the ≥tulip≤ design discussed by Ozi ; and

b) the ≥straight side≤ design as seen in Frˆhlich.

5. Dimensions and wire placement. This includes total length of the reed, and the length of scrape. Ingeneral, the length of a historical bassoon reed is longer than a modern reed.

C. Why one cannot make a playable reed using primary sources alone.

Primary sources do not provide enough detail and precision.

II. Important areas of reed making

A. Cane selection and quality.

1. Many primary sources say that it is the cane that gives the tone quality to the reed, not the manner in which the reed was made.

2. Cane was inexpensive and readily available.

a) Used in the textile industry for the comb or peigne in weaving machines. Peigne fabrication was a large industry itself.

b) Cane gathered for reed-making was only a miniscule amount compared to that needed in the weaving industry.

c) Only Almenr‰der in Die Kunst des Fagottblasens (1842) mentions this fact:

≥In Germany, the cane of Spain is best obtained from the manufacturing regions where it is used in large quantities in making a certain utensil used by the weaving industry.≤

3. Cane that was used in 17^th and 18^th century reed-making was softer or less dense and therefore less stiff.

a) The Heinrich density test is an important tool for assigning a density to bassoon cane.

4. Reasons why I believe that the cane was softer.

a) They used tapered gouge. To compensate for the soft cane, they made the vibrating part of the reed from the stiffer layer of the cane

b) This was the period of the ≥Little Ice Age.≤

c) Many of the primary sources say that while you could obtain cane from France, the preferred countries of choice for obtaining cane were Italy and Spain.

d) Most of the primary sources give warning not to use spongy cane.

e) Froehlich, in his Systematischer Unterricht (1829), says,

≥For bassoon one should not take an overly mature, consequently too hard cane. The clarinet requires a firm cane, the oboe a somewhat softer, the bassoon an even softer cane that is otherwise good and mature.≤

f) Almenr‰der, in his Fagottblasens (1842), makes several interesting statements regarding the hardness of cane. First, he says he is certain that he could obtain a better reed using pine wood than dense cane, and then he describes a fingernail test to discern the hardness of cane.

g) Anecdotally, carpenters will tell you that one cannot use modern wood to match original wood in older homes, so scrap wood from other older construction must be used.

h) The use of irrigation and fertilizer will affect the quality and size of the cane.

B. Gouge.

1. The gouge figured prominently in primary sources. In fact, all five of the primary sources used for this study (Ozi, Frˆhlich, Cokken, Willent-Bordogni and Almenr‰der) discuss it.

2. The gouge needs to be both tapered and eccentric.

a. The majority of extant original reeds that I have seen were scraped using a historical scrape, or what I call ≥en biseau≤ (obliquely.)

b. Froehlich, in his Systematischer Unterricht (1829), describes in detail a gouge that is eccentric.

c. 18^th-century reed-makers used a tapered gouge because the cane was less dense then. They did this to make the reed blade from the denser (therefore stiffer) layer of the cane, closer to the epidermis (bark). In addition, considering the large amount of material that needs to be removed from a piece of cane to make a bassoon reed, I have personally found that it is easier and faster to remove the soft material [the pith] from the underside of the cane than the hard material [the epidermis and the fiber band] from the outside of the cane.

d. Gouge thickness that I use. The slope toward the tip needs to start about the first wire or a few millimeters in front of the first wire. I have noticed that if the gouge is too thin at the firstwire, the reed will not play well in the upper register. So I try to keep the thickness here about 1.2 mm. The slope of the gouge is not a straight line from the first wire to the tip, I usually start the taper fairly flat, then at I get closer to the tip, the slope becomes more pronounced. I use as a center thickness at the tip of about .75 to .80 mm. To make the gouge eccentric, I taper the sides down to about .4 mm at the tip.

C. Thickness of arÍte is very important to the playing characteristics of the reed.

1. Most of the sources discuss the gouging process in greater detail than the scraping of the reed blade,

2. Frˆhlich is more detailed in his Systematischer Unterricht (1829), providing one of the first descriptions of the formation of an arÍte.

3. Closing the reed with the thumb and index finger is an effective test to determine the relationship of arÍte to the sides of the blade.

III. Conclusion

A. The following items in the historical reed-making process were emphasized:

1. The use of a gouge that is tapered from back to the tip and from the center to the sides.

2. The use of cane of a lesser density than normally used today.

3. The use of a slightly thicker center of the reed blade or arÍte.

4. The use of the form of the tube needs to be a flat oval at the first wire.

B. If it is true that 18^th and 19^th century cane was softer than that used today, then the bassoon would have had a darker, less bright sound with fewer high overtones

C. Areas that need further research.

1. The stiffness and viscosity of both hard and soft cane in transversal and longitudinal directions.

2. Reed tone quality in relation to the hardness of cane as the 19^th century progressed.

Dr. David J. Rachor

Professor of Bassoon

University of Northern Iowa

School of Music

Cedal Falls, Iowa

1.319.273.2374 voice

1.319.273.7320 fax

rachor@uni.edu

Primary sources

Almenraeder, Carl. 1843. Die Kunst des Fagottblasens. Mainz: Schott, 122-27.

Brod, Henri. 1830. MÈthode pour le Hautbois, 111.

Cokken, Jean FranÁois. 1842. MÈthode de Basson. Paris, 125-26.

Cugnier, Pierre. 1780. ´ MÈthode de Pierre Cugnier.ª In Jean-Benjamin de Laborde.1780. Essai sur la musique. Paris, 324-43.

Frˆhlich, Joseph. 1810. Vollst‰ndige Theoretisch-Praktische Musiklehre.

In Marvin DaGrade. 1970. A translation and study of the Bassoon section of Joseph Frˆhlichπs Vollst‰ndige Theoretisch-Praktische Musiklehre, Document,

Indiana University, 9-18.

Frˆhlich, Joseph. 1829. Systematischer Unterricht in den Vorz¸glichsten Orchester

Instrumenten. Translation by Gene Griswold in ≥A Translation of the Bassoon Reed Making Instructions in Joseph Frˆhlichπs 1829 ≥Fagott-Schule,≤Journal of the I.R.D.S. 19, 1991, 27-34.

Jancourt, EugËne. 1847. MÈthode thÈorique et pratique pour le basson. Paris, 16.

Ozi, Etienne. 1803. Nouvelle MÈthode de Bassoon. Paris, 142-44.

Van-Der-Hagen. 1792. MÈthode nouvelle et raisonnÈe pour le Hautbois, 5.

Willent-Bordogny, Jean Baptiste. 1844. MÈthode complËte pour le basson. Paris,

102-03.

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Benade, Arthur H. 1976. Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics, Oxford University Press,

438-39.

Campbell, Murray and Clive Greated. 1987. The Musicianπs Guide to Acoustics.

Oxford University Press, 260.

Diderot, Denis, Rameauπs Nephew and other works, Jacques Barzun and

Ralph H. Bowen, translators, 1956. Doubleday Anchor Books, 319-20.

Doursther, Horace. 1840. Dictionnaire Universel des Poids et Mesures Anciens

et Modernes. Bruxelles: M. Hayez, 211.

Fagan, Brian. 2000. The Little Ice Age. New York: Basic Books, 170.

Fletcher, Neville H. and Thomas D. Rossing. 1999. The Physics of MusicalInstruments,

Second Edition. Springer-Verlag, 405.

Hall, Donald. 1980. Musical Acoustics, An Introduction. Wadsworth Publishing Co., 287.

Haynes, Bruce. 2001. The Eloquent Oboe. Oxford University Press, 117.

Heinrich, Jean-Marie. 1987. Recherches sur les proprietes densitometriques du materiau

Canne de Provence. Alfa Lyon Musique. Chapter III.

Hirschberg, A. 1995. ≥Aero-Acoustics of Wind Instruments,≤ in Mechanics of Musical Instruments, Springer-Verlag, section 7.4, Quasi-stationary theory of double reeds.

Lawson, Colin. 2000. The Early Clarinet. Cambridge University Press, 36.

Light, Jay. 1983. The Oboe Reed Book. Drake University, 34.

Smith, David Hogan. 1992. Reed Design for Early Woodwinds. Indiana University Press,

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White, Paul. 1993. The Early Bassoon Reed in Relation to the Development of the

Bassoon from 1636. Dissertation, University of Oxford.

(N.B. Major primary sources used for this study in bold)