The Congress at Graz, Austria, last August: 500 participants from 30 countries. It was truly a meeting of the INTERNATIONAL Double Reed Society. And it was soooo exciting! I can't begin to describe what a thrill it was to exchange ideas and music with so many artist/ bassoonists from so many different worlds, playing in so many different styles. It truly "boggled" the mind.
Let me use one musical note of the bassoon - the middle register D above middle C - that sometimes problem child note - to illustrate what could be learned by observation and "brain -picking" from so many different sources at one's disposal, as was the case at Graz.
I already knew that the French bassoon attempts to tame this D - somewhat unsuccessfully, I feel - by fingering it:
Cecil James had taught me the English solution to the problem:
which the French reject as too sharp in pitch. I also had used the same "English" fingering on my old 4000 series Heckel to tune the pitch on the D. But at Graz I observed many German bassoonists, virtually all the Viennese players, and a number of East Europeans using this fingering almost all the time. It gives a stable but somewhat muffled quality to the pitch. I'm not sure whether its use was stylistic or due to a difference in reed styles, but it was a distinctly prominent feature of European, especially Germanic and Slavic, bassoon playing. There was an obvious need by them to temper this pitch.
A little later in the Congress, while I was trying out some lovely Fox bassoons at the exhibits, I noticed that they were quite satisfactory overall except for a tendency to wildness in pitch on the D and a bit of harshness on the E above that. It was decidedly better and less prevalent when one used a Heckel bocal on the Fox bassoon. When I mentioned this to Laurie Taylor at the Fox exhibit he said that the Fox company hoped to get into bocal research now that they were getting satisfactory results from their wood research. And then he told me something else about that same middle D that I didn't know - that there was a nodal point (point of zero vibration, I believe) for it right on top of the bocal, which, if you wet your finger and ran it along this spot, could sometimes actually stop a softly played D from vibrating! I asked further: "Well then, would you think that Heckel might make a bocal thinner or thicker or the same at that point to stabilize the D? And Laurie's response was: "Off the top of my head I'd probably say thicker. " Could this be a contributing factor to the general superiority of a Heckel bocal - especially in this register?
I don't know the answer to this. Perhaps some of you readers have further knowledge here. (If so, please share it with us!) But I do know I came away from Graz with my mind absolutely spinning with new concepts and ideas. To hear Valerie Popov, Chantal Carry, Milan Turkovic, etc., etc. perform so beautifully, in such distinctly different styles was indescribably exciting. To discover some fantastically innovative approaches to reedmaking from people like Bill Winstead, and his "recipes" for reed-blade contours, and Artemus Edwards, and his adjustments to plastic reeds which make them in every way as useable, flexible, and beautifully sounding as cane reeds was, to repeat myself, "mind-boggling".1
If you missed Graz, I am sorry because you missed five glorious days of International Doublereeding! But don't look back. Come to Boulder, Colorado, next summer from August 12 through 15.
We must go back to Europe (or Asia?) soon, however. Paris is a possibility in the near future. Or perhaps Moscow, Russia?!!
There's an appropriate equation at work here: As the world gets smaller the artistry of the world's bassoonists gets bigger. Come to Boulder in '85 and let your artistry "grow" a few inches. It's guaranteed!
ENDNOTE
1.
Both Bill and Artemus have promised to share the fruits of their
research, when completed, with the members of the IDRS - either
by appearances at future Congresses or through publication. We
eagerly await their work.
