Introducing Beethoven's Contrabassoon

This is copied from an original contrabassoon I have, which was made in about 1810, and Beethoven himself may well have heard it, we don't know. I made this copy about seven years ago. People ask ask the question "how did the contrabassoon arise, how did it come about?" Well there were shawm bands in the 15th and 16th century and they decided to have a gross bass pommer, which was a very large shawm, and it developed from that. What happened was that there were Austrian marching bands on the continent where they needed a 16-foot sound to go below the bassoons, so this is how this contra came about. The range of the classical contrabassoon is two and a half octaves, starting on low C which we have here and going up to high G. Beethoven used the full range in his Fifth Symphony incorporating trombones and the contrabassoon for the first time in any symphony, so it was a really new thing for him and for everybody. The technology to make these instruments advanced quite a lot. The modern contrabassoon has a bow at the top which this instrument doesn't have they didn't have the technology so the instrument went straight up and also the modern contrabassoon has many many more keys which help you with all the chromatic notes. It's probably easier to hold because it sits on the floor the whereas this sits either on a sling or on a belt. The classical is generally much softer and has some really nice pure notes. It also has some terrible notes which are difficult to get because you haven't got extra keys that you have on the modern one. The modern one is also louder because the bore is bigger so you produce a much bigger sound for the modern symphony orchestra with steel strings and louder brass with bigger bore. Here are the two sorts of reeds the one on my right is the classical contrabassoon reed and the one on my left is the modern one. As you see it's much shorter so it makes the pitch higher. The thing about starting a project on the classical contrabassoon is you really have to prepare the reeds and the embouchure is different so you're controlling the reed a different way to the modern one which almost sounds the same but not quite, so you see more difficult to make the reeds as well because they're much thicker and longer Haydn as we all know was a master of orchestration. He wrote three oratorios which use the contrabassoon. One was The Creation. In The Creation the contras featured in many of the choruses but in one particular bass aria, number 21, it describes the beasts in the field and this really is one note which everybody can remember from the piece you

Channel: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

Views: 2,196,853

Keywords: orchestra age enlightenment, oae, period instruments, contrabassoon, contrabassoon music, contrabassoon range, David Chatterton, double reed, bassoon, classical bassoon

Id: gMoOhCh_GUM

Length: 5min 32sec (332 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 15 2018