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I have had been on a trip to Vienna for the last few weeks. The Hofburg palace houses an antique instrument museum which to my surprise had many bassoons and contrabassoons! So here are a few but not all of the instruments on display

Entrance to Antique Instrument Museum

bassoon family

bassoon family back

bassoons

This Contrabassoon was built by Bradka in Vienna, this was his standard model in 1870.

Stehle Bassoon

This bassoon was built by Johann Stehle who at the time was considered to be one of the finest instrument makers in the German speaking regions. This instrument was an experiment as it has a tuning slide on the wing joint to lengthen the bore between the register vents and tones holes. This bassoon also has an split bell to add on a low A attachment.

Woodwind Family

 This Contrabassoon was built by Bradka for the Viennese Jubilee crafts exhibition in 1888. This design differs from his previous models because of the rounded U-tubes to create less air resistance. “Bradka seems to have oriented this to a model from 1976 by Alfred Morton” (the contrabassophone maker)

The bassoon is a Heckel from the 1880s.

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The usable range of the Contraforte is from A0-C5. This is an improvement on the contrabassoon range by a few steps. Although I know some very talented contra players that can play almost as high as any contraforte. Im mostly posting this so that composers are able to hear the timbre change of the different registers.

The Contraforte does not have a dependable high D but it is possible. Here I play the opening bassoon solo from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, at actually pitch. I used an extremely thick reed with a lot of resistance.

Contraforte Fingering Chart

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Thomas Adès

This weekend (March 5,6,7) Thomas Adès with be conducting his own composition with the San Francisco Symphony. His piece “In Seven Days” is based on the seven days of creation outlined in the book of Genesis. It is a multimedia piece including video projection and he scored it using a contraforte!

Bay area people should all go and hear some contraforte in Davies hall!

SF Symphony Tickets

This is the first time that contraforte has been used in the San Francisco Symphony and it will be performed by Steven Braunstein.

Steven Braunstein Contraforte

Steve Kris ContraforteHere I am visiting the Contraforte tamer

 

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Green Reed

I tried an experiment last week involving a Green Reed for Contraforte. I just harvested some cane in early January and decided to try to immediately make a reed out of it instead of letting it dry. And this is what turned out! I regular reed that sounded and acted like any other reed but it was fresh green cane and didnt need to be soaked in water before I played on it. The texture was similar to a very hard piece of cane so I had to make this thinner than I would normally. After a few days it started to dry out and warp and is now is playing very sharp. Next I’m going to try this on regular bassoon.

I would suggest trying it to all of the cane harvesters out there!