I was playing a concert recently with a rather speedy Bach continuo part. As I was practicing, it occurred to me to wonder what exactly had happened to the technique of double-tonguing on the bassoon in the first part of the 20th century.
Plenty of Baroque continuo parts, including those usually including bassoon, contain passages that only the most freakish of wagglers could single-tongue. It seems obvious that Baroque bassoonists must have been able to double tongue; and sure enough, in JJ Quantz’s chapter on articulation, after describing several tonguing techniques including double tonguing, he notes:
Why Quantz thinks you can’t double tongue on the oboe is a mystery for another day (or for a Baroque oboist to tell me); the point is, bassoonists were known double-tonguers in 1752, if not known good-reed-havers.
Why, then, did double-tonguing seem to disappear from the toolbox for a period of time? That it did is of course anecdotal, but it does seem to me that among the generation of professional bassoonists who got jobs in the early or mid 20th century, it was very much an optional technique. That generation is largely gone from the active playing scene, but many people still have stories of teachers or older colleagues who didn’t double tongue, and I have even heard it said by some of those players that bassoons don’t double tongue, or that if they do it is a new invention. (This does seem to be largely true on clarinet. “Fucking slur two tongue two… shit!”)
Bassoon historians slide into my DMs…
Linhan Cui is the real deal, as a conductor, and will soon be snapped up by a major orchestra if there’s any justice in the world; in the meantime, I treasure every concert I get to play under her direction.
What if Clive Barker had a fever dream of Snow White as imagined by Angela Carter? This is the question nobody but me asked, but I imagine Angelin Preljocaj’s Blanche Neige to answer.
Winnipeg is one of my favourite orchestras to play with, and recently I was invited to play guest principal for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of this show. The draw for musicians is that it’s a new ballet constructed entirely out of Mahler symphonies; but once I watched a video of a previous production sent to the orchestra, I was also excited for the reaction to the work, which is– look, I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that this is a very sexy ballet. The costumes were designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. The sexy cats had headgear intended to convey the danceable impression of ball gags. When Snow White eats the apple, it’s less a trick and more of an orgasmic force feeding.
I’m not casting aspersions. It all– in my opinion, from the production I did watch and the reaction of the Winnipeg audience– worked great. There is something about the project of presenting Mahler as anything other than an integral whole symphony that invites, nearly demands, a certain amount of enjoyable grotesquerie; Ken Russell comes to mind. That said, the music was not as chopped up as you might think it would have to be; no crazy cuts and very few significant alterations to make the music fit the dance. There were even two entire movements, the Purgatorio of the Tenth symphony and the third movement of the First, which accompanied probably one of the most memorable stagings in the show: the introduction of the seven dwarves (I think credited here instead as “miners”), an entire vertical ballet taking place on a sheer rock face, one of the pieces of it that is available online:
The only really wacky alteration was this section, from the very end of the 3rd movement of the Third symphony, being repeated eleven times:
…which is how I learned that in the Brothers Grimm version of the story, the happily ever after is that the Prince orders the evil Queen to dance herself to death while wearing a pair of red-hot iron shoes, which is what is happening during the above. Disney sure didn’t mention that part!
Anyway, I’m very much hoping that the National Ballet or some other company around these parts picks this up, as I’d like to see it properly!
The last time I was at the National Music Camp, I was 14 and played a bassoon for the first time in the beginning bassoon elective. This summer I returned as a faculty member. (Full disclosure… once I started playing bassoon in earnest, my allegiance was firmly to the other music camp, on the grounds that the dining hall was quieter and they didn’t make you do “evening program,” so I never actually attended as a camper on bassoon.)
I didn’t take all that many pictures– one of the excellent things this camp did was take away all the camper’s phones, so there just wasn’t much photo-taking culture in the absence of ubiquitous devices. To be honest, I suspect a lot of the kids (those who didn’t sneak them in anyway, that is) were relieved to have them gone for a week. Hey, maybe they’ll do the same for the faculty in the future!
Laurel leading a very cozy band sectional
A bat taking a rest outside the bassoon studio (I realize this does not exactly look like the peak of bat health, but at least it flew away and we didn’t have a dead bat to deal with…)
Not a camper any more… they can’t force me to stay in the loud horrible dining hall… ate all my meals on the dock with my buddy Montaigne.
Very good doggo getting ready to listen to faculty wind quintet rehearsal
Arcady Ensemble’s “Garden Walk” concert– the first half was a setup where, instead of musicians assembling in a central location for a concert, musicians are spread out through the Whistling Gardens playing solo works with related thematic material, and the audience walks around through them. Ronald Beckett’s music is always fantastic and the dedication of his audience to the ensemble is impressive.
My spot in the garden
The entrance to the performance space
Who am I to disagree?
Back in Regina to play Aura Pon’s Romp and Repose.
Our old house for sale… (not by us, the landlord had planned to sell it when we moved out)
That cat in the window of that place on Albert
SCARY SWOLE BUNS I MISSED YOU
This week we played two iterations of a holiday circus show— one in Brandon, and one in Regina. The first show, in Brandon, was in a hockey arena, and featured a Wheel of Death, which I’d never gotten to see live before. Unfortunately, the show in Regina was in the Conexus Arts Centre which is too small for it.
The part for Sleigh Ride featured the signatures of everyone who’d played the show recently– so of course the following evening I got a text from Mike Hope of the Calgary Philharmonic, who was playing the show that evening. (In the Saddledome, so they did have enough room for the wheel…) Sign your rental and touring parts, folks! :D
- As I mentioned, I memorized the piece to play for a recording with piano, but used the music in performance with the orchestra. I taped together the part such that there were no page turns during movements, but it still left a page turn in between Craeb Uisnig and Dathi, which are attaca. I wrote in the rest bars at the beginning of Dathi on the previous page, and waited to turn until mm 15, the 2/4 bar where the wind section is making the most noise.
- Mm 41. Let me tell you a story. When I first heard Judith Leclair’s recording of this, I didn’t like that she played this bar legato. Nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t like it, and wanted to play it more emphatically. Except every time I tried, I cacked at least one note in it. When I tried it legato, presto, cacks gone. After several months of this, I gave up and played it legato. And they all lived happily ever after, the end.
- Mm 45, move a little… compared to what? Unclear, but I chose to interpret this as move a little compared to the dramatico section immediately preceding it, and consequently my tempo for 45is a little bit slower than for 35: better to not sound rushed on the runs in what should be a fairly calm section, at least for the first few bars.
- Mm 46 in the second edition of the bassoon part is, mystifyingly, marked 45a in the score and orchestra parts, and the numbering discrepancy remains for the rest of the movement. I’ll here continue referring to location by their marking in the bassoon part.
- Mm 50: 80 to the EIGHTH. Not the quarter. Jesus Christ. (At least, this is closer to the tempo of both recordings, and… well, try it yourself and see.)
- Mm 70 I played the easy version. Sue me.
Or, as my partner and I took to calling it, “the crab uprising.” Although this was the most difficult movement to learn and memorize, it turned out to actually be one of the easiest in performance. The solution (for me, and the conductor and orchestra I performed it with) was to just completely cede control to the conductor. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, and having a steady beat to follow made it easy on me— and not having to try to follow me made it easy, I hope, on everyone else.
Taking a survey of all two commercial recordings of the piece, the eventual tempo of both is 160 to the eighth. Towards the end of my preparation I was playing it mostly at 170, but I put in my order for 160 anyway, and was glad I did— it felt just slow enough in performance to remind me not to rush.
Since I had decided in advance that I would ask to be a follower, not a leader of this one, I also made a few different videos of myself conducting it at tempos between 150 and 176, and then later also asked my husband to conduct it while standing beside me to practice watching out of the corner of my eye. Both helped a lot.
On to the specifics:
- Start whisper locked Breathe with conductor’s upbeat for a relaxed-feeling first bar.
- Mm 3 R4 on F#, hold flick key for C (and all subsequent notes in that register when locked, obviously.) Lock will pay off in mm 6.
- Mm 7, and all of the triplet runs coming up, are at risk of rushing, take them easy.
- Mm 9 unlock during quarter rest Mm 15, 16 L fingering only on runs
- Mm 17 hear the timpani in rests Mm 31 L hand only for C# and high A
- Mm 32 L for Db, then use a fingering involving R4 for the F# so you can keep R4 there while slapping down the usual L hand for A before sweeping the L thumb up for the rest. My experience with this run was that focusing on hearing the high A would ensure the rest of it popped out easily, whereas stressing about the very top of the run would cause the entire upper range to cack.
- Mm 35-37 For me this run was all about not rushing, and by extension, figuring out which notes I was most likely to give short shrift in the race to the top. Technology to the rescue, with slow-downer apps. I use the iOS app Anytune, but there are plenty of others available: just record yourself at tempo with no metronome, slow it down, and see what you’re really doing! For me, once I had gone through about a year’s worth of slow practice and various rhythmic tricks to work it up to tempo, the note that I most often skipped or rushed over was the F in the second beat of 36. Again, if I concentrated on that note, and also cast a glance in the direction of the C at the very end of the bar, preparation took care of the rest and it popped out.
- Mm 43-44, essentially the same process as the previous big run. In the interest of full disclosure, my accuracy rate was slightly lower on this one, but locating my anchor note (the high B in the last beat of 44) and calmly concentrating on nailing that note still generally produced at least an acceptable smear, mercifully ending on a high D.
- Mm 75, do not even try to breathe in that rest.
- Mm 76, last eighth note beat: a forcefully articulated E, then just lift R 2 and 3 for a passable-under-the-circumstances F#. I did a lot of practicing of just this beat, then adding on the runs leading up to it piece by piece. - Mm 88 The only trill fingering I could figure out for this was to play a high C with the D flick key, then trill R3. At least on my bassoon, it wasn’t ideal in that it had a tendency to cack if pushed too hard in the swells. Luckily the orchestra is the main event in those bars anyway, but if anyone knows something better, grab your time machine and HMU a year ago, thanks.
- There’s an eighth rest in the orchestra before the bassoon enters at 97, so hear the silence before jumping in.
- Note the difference in the rhythm between 98 and 99.
- 103-109 these statements can be out of tempo, but really why bother.
- 115-120 I had a hell of a time with cacking these Bbs, and I honestly have no idea why. What eventually worked as to give each one the slightest separation in the air before each one. Hopefully not too noticeable.
- 123 They’re only sixteenths, no rushing.