For the past six years I've been preparing a book on 19th Century bassoon systems that, for one reason or another, failed and were just not good ideas, such as Adolph Sax's metal bassoon; some because they tended to change the tone quality of the bassoon too much, such as the Triebert-Marzoli-Boehm system, that drilled the tone holes in the acoustically correct place in the conical tube and then failed for another reason by employing a too complicated mechanism of over redundancy in an effort to enable it to be fingered more easily. But the greatest reason that they failed was because of the economic infeasibility of building a better bassoon for a handful of players (in the 19th century anyway) as opposed to revising the flute and/or clarinet for a huge mass of players -- both amateur and professional.
But that reason doesn't wash in the 20th century anymore. Nowadays there are a heck of a lot of bassoon players around, and I would humbly submit that today's makers should construct us a better bassoon.
Let me be specific. I would like to see a maker take the tube of the modern bassoon with all of its strange qualities, including its elliptically drilled holes and long chimneys (I don't want to change the bassoon timbre-- I love it as it is!) and design a better mechanism for its execution. I propose a Boehm concept of:
I propose groupings of alternate keys for the thumbs and little fingers of each hand. I propose a more logically conceived mechanism for the high note fingerings -- perhaps borrowed from the French system instrument, and so on.
Sure, there's a perverse satisfaction with the mastery of the complex fingering of the present German or French instrument, but wouldn't an improved mechanism make it even better? When I look at the ease with which my colleagues on the flute, clarinet, and saxophone can master highly technical passages, or worse yet, when I have to listen to them complain profusely about that occasional forked or difficult fingering they have to endure, I really question whether we have brought the bassoon to its "final form." Besides if we've mastered the bassoon so well then why hasn't a bassoon virtuoso the likes of Rampal or Stoltzman, or now Malcolm Messiter emerged? (I'm told the latter has extra keys on his oboe for facility. Isn't that "cheating" by our rules, bassoonists?)
I propose bassoon reform. I'm looking for that player and/or maker with the same zeal and guts that Karl Almenraeder and Johann Adam Heckel had in the late 1820's when they set out to build a better bassoon. I wonder what those pioneers would think of us today if we had to admit to them that we were still using their basic design 150 years later! I think it's time we took the bassoon out of the Nineteenth Century. Any takers out there?
Ronald Klimko