Take a deep breath now.  There are no equations here but some of the language will be challenging.  I promise to translate these ideas in later chapters.

If you ask a physicist to describe the basic mechanism of sound production on a bassoon, you might get the following:

5. Before this returning pulse reaches the bocal tip, the reed is vibrating at multiple frequencies. The initial blowing impulse got it vibrating with a very broad collection of frequencies (not at all-equal amplitudes, however).When the reflected compression pulse reaches this vibrating reed, the pulse’s higher air pressure tries to open the reed.  This inhibits the reed from vibrating at many of its natural frequencies—in particular, those frequencies for which the reed is trying to close when the pulse arrives).  In contrast, the reflected pulse reinforces the reed motion for many other frequencies—those for which the reed is trying to opening when the pulse arrives.

6. In this manner, this first reflected pulse constrains the reed’s vibrations and encourages them to be consistent with the natural frequency and harmonics of the bassoon tube. Bassoon makers have expended huge efforts over the last 150 years to make these natural frequencies pleasantly related and in tune with each other. These natural frequencies are immensely complicated functions of:

• the tube length to the first open hole,
• lengths to closed holes below that first open one
• all the details of the bore diameter, including cross-sectional-area “bumps” in the bore caused by closed holes,
• the volume of the bore,
• the tendency of the bore towards being either cylindrical or conical

7. As more and more pulses travel up/down the bore, they even out and set up a standing wave in the bore for each fundamental and its participating harmonics. This equilibrium is reached quite quickly, because the pulse velocity in the bore is essentially very fast (about 1 foot per millisecond). Remember my description of the ‘peeping pitch’ – the simplest tone you can get on a bassoon reed?  Well, when you take a finished bassoon reed and peep on it lightly enough that no ‘crow’ starts, you are not hearing the reed’s natural frequencies. Instead, you are hearing the standing wave set up inside the reed tube and caused by impedance-discontinuity reflection at the lower, open end of the reed tube. The reeds natural frequencies are much higher and are very “broadband” because of the graininess of arundo donax.

If you’re fingering a middle C [262 Hz], no matter what you do with your blowing pressure and embouchure, you’re not going to produce a D.  [The most you can do is play the C flatter or sharper – unless you build a reed that’s four inches long or the size of a toothpick.)

It stands to reason that something about the behaviour of the reed is determined by how many keys you have open or closed.   But if the reed is an independent sound generator (remember Skinner’s tuned oscillator?), how can it be so restricted by the choice of fingering and the length of the air column?  If you finger C, the reed vibrates at 261 Hz? Why not 277 Hz?  Why not 246 Hz?

The obvious answer is contained in paragraphs 5 – 7 above. The bassoon itself is exercising massive control over the behaviour of the reed.  The delivery of acoustical energy may start as a one-way street – blowing into the reed, but sustained tone at the correct pitches turns out to be a two-way street.  You can even go so far as to describe it as a master/servant relationship.  And the reed is the servant!

And perhaps the best way to describe it is this – a reed is a pressure-controlled valve.  It’s not your blowing pressure that controls; rather it’s the acoustical pressure variations within the bore – the constant alternation between compression and rarefaction – that govern the reeds behaviour.

The bassoon itself is the real source of the sound; the reed just supplies the ongoing energy.   

This is likely to be a shift in how you imagine and visualize your reeds.

The preceding ideas are going to need reinforcement, so I’m going to go back and explain them using different language.

Tune in next Friday for Chapter 5!

Christopher Millard giving a lecture and recital at the Stockholm Royal Palace 2018

Introduction

As aspiring bassoonists, success with reeds is the essential ingredient in your recipe for happiness.  When you find a good reed you nurture it.   You pray it remains faithful.  When University life gets busy, you might avoid the reed room for a few days, but everyone knows they need to get back to their tools and to their cane.  Next week’s lesson, next month’s orchestra concert, tomorrow night’s wind quintet, all loom ahead.  Every time you put the reed on a bocal you wonder if you are going to be able to make music – or simply suffer.

Those of us who make a living at this -and those of us who want to – have a hard time explaining to our families and friends just how problematic and time consuming this reed making business is.

The aspiring bassoonist goes about learning reed making by absorbing and imitating.  We are generally given a set of instructions designed to replicate the practices of our teachers, using specific dimensions and a series of steps that will lead to a functional reed.  We don’t have equivalents for Newton’s laws of thermodynamics, no ‘first principles’ upon which to build our knowledge.  It is an empirical skill that we seek to perfect through trial and error.  And unlike laws of physics, which are universally true, our reed making experiments resist consistently successful outcomes.

In the following pages – Brains and Membranes – I’m going to tell you about my own journey and introduce you to some common sense ideas about the relationship of reeds to bassoons.

I knew Sol Schoenbach as a brilliant man who spoke with clarity and forethought and he never spoon-fed his students!  

So, rather quickly, I became convinced he was just tossing an overly simplistic hypothesis my way, expecting I would pursue further investigation and makes some sense of it all.

A very young Sol Schoenbach at the reed desk of oboist, Marcel Tabuteau at a time when they were both principals of the Philadelphia Orchestra

Photo sent by Peter Schoenbach

Schoenbach’s own reed-making history was rather modest.  He told me how he had gone to Germany after the war to study with the legendary reed maker Mechler.  He claimed that on the first day cut his thumb with a reed knife and immediately decided that this was not how he wanted to spend his life.  This sounds a bit apocryphal, but like many bassoon artists of his era he usually had his reeds made for him by others for much of his career.

During my first year of study with Schoenbach  he sent me to up to a little fishing village on the Maine coast to spend a week with the reed maker and pedagogue Louis Skinner.

Skinner, who was the most loving and gentle man you could imagine, got me organized.  He showed me how to improve my skills with tools, gave me some clear ideas about designs, measurements and techniques, and imparted some basic ideas about reed acoustics.  During subsequent visits to Skinner, my techniques and outcomes improved, but I can’t say that I came to a satisfying understanding of the underlying mysteries of the reeds and bassoons.

In the following chapters I’ll introduce you to a different way of thinking about reeds and perhaps guide you to a clear path to happiness.

Chapter 1 – The Craftsman

Louis Skinner was a master craftsman.  He guided many of my generation to more systematic approaches to their reed making.

At the heart of Skinner’s thinking was this: you build a ‘tuned’ reed to make your bassoon play efficiently.  A properly tuned reed is responsive, not too sharp and not too flat with an attractive sound.

In our very first conversation about the principles of reed making, he defined the bassoon reed as a ‘tuned oscillator’.

He showed how to put your lips over the first wire and blow very lightly to find a particular ‘peeping’ frequency, which might range from a D to a G.  And this led to the assumption that reeds are fixed pitch tone generators.  In other words, it seems that the reed sounds a specific fundamental frequency, which enters the bocal and comes out at the other end as the Jolivet Concerto.

Skinner was very clear that he associated the basic ‘peeping’ pitch* of the reed with its dimensions; longer reeds had a lower basic frequency and shorter reeds had a higher basic sound.  For example, a reed that measured 28 mm from first wire to tip might sound a D, a reed that measured 27 mm should sound an Eb, and so on.  Of course, this was just a guide, and it turns out that for many players a 28 mm reed producing a D natural is too flat. Although he was initially quite firm about following specific length/pitch rules, Skinner certainly understood that the peeping pitches were dependent on many variables.

*”Peeping pitch’ is the simplest tone you can make by placing the lips over the first wire and blowing lightly.

So, early in my reed-making life I committed to this way of thinking.  I viewed the behavior of reeds in a very uni-directional way: that they produce a tone [a fundamental pitch with its own series of harmonics], which somehow modifies into all the available pitches.  It is a simple and appealing concept, that your bassoon magically transforms the peeping of the reed to produce all the notes on the bassoon.

I was particularly grateful to Skinner for his very organized pedagogy.  It got me building reeds with consistent structures and some guidelines about how to make them function.

Against all odds, I ended up winning a first bassoon chair when I was 22.  I was thrilled but often miserable.  I wasn’t ready as a musician and I had no confidence in my reed making.  I was convinced I would not earn my tenure in the orchestra. So, during my first seasons I spent 4 or 5 hours a day at the reed bench – even more than I had done as a student.

Somehow, my older colleagues took pity on me and decided that I would eventually improve, so I did get past probation and got more and more determined to live some part of my life away from the damn reed desk.  Skinner had been a great help in giving me grounding, but I started to think it was time to learn something about how the bassoon worked.  So, I bought Arthur Benade’s books on acoustics, then those of John Backus, then the indecipherable (but brilliant) Cornelis Nederveen, and so on.

If you want good answers, you need good questions.

In the next chapter, I’ll ask some good questions.

Tune in next Friday for Chapter 2, “Can you explain how a bassoon reed works?”

Épiphanie Chromatique

par Mathieu Lussier

C’est arrivé encore aujourd’hui. Ce n’est vraiment pas la première fois que ça arrive. Certainement pas la dernière. Ça fonctionne à tous les coups.

Pourtant…je ne suis pas croyant, je fonde mes convictions personnelles sur les avancées de la science et ce phénomène, je le reconnais, se rapproche très certainement plus des croyances  Jedi que des travaux d’Einstein….

Je joue du basson depuis 35 ans. Depuis maintenant environ 15 ans (touchons du bois), j’ai l’impression d’avoir trouvé une façon de faire mes anches relativement simple, constante et fiable, me permettant de ne pas constamment vivre dans une paranoïa à l’approche d’un concert ou d’un enregistrement.

C’est donc arrivé aujourd’hui. Après avoir échoué dans le grattage consécutif de deux anches j’ai appliqué le traitement choc : changer la couleur du fil d’anche utilisé!

Après une longue et merveilleuse séquence, mon magnifique fil bleuté a dû céder (temporairement je l’espère) la place à ma bobine de fil blanc.

Ça se manifeste comme une voix intérieure, un fort appel, une conviction. C’était la chose à faire et, encore une fois, cela a fonctionné.

Est-ce que le fil blanc fonctionne toujours ? non, évidemment. Il m’est arrivé le contraire, de passer du blanc au bleu, du rouge au blanc, du rouge au bleu, en passant par le noir, le vert, le rose, le jaune…

Certaines couleurs, magnifiques, ne fonctionnent simplement jamais. Pourquoi? Difficile à dire…Certaines couleurs, comme le rouge, font généralement consensus. D’autres, comme le vert, polarisent…Pourquoi? Impossible à discuter ouvertement sans risquer l’internement.

C’est un phénomène qui me fascine. La seule conviction « paranormale » que j’assume complètement, si on laisse de côté ma fascination pour la famille royale britannique.

J’ai cependant la certitude que je ne suis pas seul à croire aux pouvoirs des différentes couleurs du fil de nos anches. Étant grand fan de la saga Star Wars, tel qu’évoqué plus haut,  je me console en me disant que ce phénomène me rapproche un peu des pouvoirs des disciplines de Yoda.

Si j’ai longuement hésité à formuler cette conviction ouvertement, craignant pour ma réputation, cette dernière aurait certainement souffert à plusieurs reprises tant sont nombreux les souvenirs d’impasses terriblement angoissantes à la veille de concerts importants ou d’enregistrements de disques lors desquelles un changement de couleur de fil a tout changé.

Oscar Wilde a dit : « Les folies sont les seules choses qu’on ne regrette jamais ». C’est donc sans regret et sans honte que j’assume ce brin de folie en espérant que cette conviction, mais surtout ce pouvoir magique, ne s’estompe jamais d’ici la fin de ma carrière.

The Reed Museum, est. 2008

As a part of this process, I began intentionally collecting the reeds of teachers, friends, and many others not long after I started university which has grown into what I consider to be a sort of small museum. This collection now includes 62 reeds or blanks from 39 unique sources from the United States, Canada, and Europe (mostly Germany and the Netherlands). Most of the contributors are professional bassoonists I studied or interacted with, along with a smattering of students, friends, and commercial makers. There are reeds from orchestral musicians (sometimes from different members of the section of a single orchestra), chamber musicians, freelancers, professors, and soloists. Of the more commonly used American styles, there are representations from the pedagogical philosophies of Norman Herzberg/Benjamin Kamins, Bernard Garfield, and K. David van Hoesen, to name a few, as well as former students of those teachers who went in other directions. Well-known soloists and recording artists Nadina Mackie Jackson and Bram van Sambeek have multiple entries to their name. There are distinct reeds from inspiring past and present bassoonists belonging to groups including  the Baltimore Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the National Symphony (Washington D.C), the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Las Vegas Philharmonic, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, in no particular order.

Through numerous moves and many affectionate handlings, some reeds are in better condition than others, but all provide opportunities for learning and observation. 

 When I began to study reed-making as a teenager, I was initially very excited about what I viewed as an aspect of taking responsibility for a musician’s identity and individual needs that was unique to the double reed instruments. Upon reflection, it seems natural that an extension of this mindset was my deep curiosity about the reeds made by other people. I firmly believe that being exposed to all shapes and sizes (in this case quite literally) of ideas and approaches provides a wide range of useful information. Exploring the gamut of what different set-ups feel, sound, and look like can awaken the imagination to new possibilities of artistry, comfort, ease, and efficiency; one can also discover that the choices one makes are an appropriate fit for current demands and store the experience for future situations. I will be kind to my younger self and simply say that I was forward at times in my quest to learn, and that at this point in my life I follow different rules of etiquette when around new players.

To the less experienced reed-makers, I offer some ideas to consider during their studies from years of observing other people’s reeds and making my own. To the more experienced reed-makers, perhaps these could be of use or create opportunities for discussion and debate!

Reeds of Brian Pollard, former principal bassoonist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, 1954-1996

2. No two pieces of cane are identical, so no two reeds ever look exactly alike. “This isn’t a great example of what I do” is far and away the most common remark from experienced reed-makers when they have agreed to share an old or dysfunctional reed with me. One lesson from this is that reeds rarely, if ever, look identical to one another, even from the same experienced individual. Although this reed is not part of the museum, one of my favorite memories where this became blindingly clear was at my first professional audition. The player in the warm-up room after me sounded absolutely fabulous. We spoke later and he graciously allowed me to look at his reed, which I expected to follow certain attributes from his current teacher: no cracks, no side-slipping, fairly narrow. Instead, I saw a reed a little wider than I presumed, with a huge crack down the back of one side and a substantial side slip. He told me it was a freak piece of cane that wanted to be a good reed. After he won the audition on this reed, and multiple subsequent auditions over the next few years on the same reed, I threw preconceptions of what a great reed had to look like out the window. It is worth noting that this player is an extremely diligent reed-maker, so this “ugly duckling” was really that extraordinary.

Second bassoon reeds

In summary, reed-making and adjusting is a journey in tandem with many bassoonists’ musical lives. Perhaps this is best illustrated by a fond memory when talking with a seasoned orchestral bassoonist I admired. It was early in my reed-making studies, and I told him that I was just beginning to learn. His response: “So am I.”

Bassoonist Adam Romey is currently the Education and Community Engagement Coordinator for the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis, Minnesota.