Reeds - The Oboe and Bassoon

Almost half a century has passed since Josef Marx suggested that the oboe was invented in the 1650s and first used in Lully’s Ballet de l’amour malade of 1657. Scholars have generally accepted his reasoning; recently, however, Bruce Haynes has shown that the iconographic record supports a later dating of the emergence of the true oboe (i.e., somewhere in the 1680s), and Rebecca Harris-Warrick has questioned some of Marx’s readings of the written evidence and thus some of his conclusions. Together these researchers have furthered the view that the change from shawm to oboe was a gradual and evolutionary one, perhaps over a few decades, rather than a sudden and decisive one. While it is true that not all the characteristics we associate with the Baroque oboe had to have been present at the outset, two were absolutely essential to its acceptance as an orchestral instrument: in order to be mixed with violins, it had to play at an acceptable volume and at a compatible pitch. Historians have paid more attention to the matter of volume, even though pitch is actually the more crucial consideration from the standpoint of instrument design.
(Volume is at least as much a question of reeds.)

As pointed out by Bruce Haynes, the actual interval between a typical Renaissance treble shawm and an oboe at low French pitch is a perfect fourth—just as we have found in comparing typical Renaissance and Baroque alto recorders; the new treble instrument is once again closer in pitch to the old tenor. This pitch difference does not manifest itself so obviously as a size difference in the case of the oboe and shawm, however; the treble shawm is already rather long for its pitch, having a considerable bell extension past the fingered holes. This bell extension is not “just for show”; its proportions (and the positions of its resonance holes) are carefully engineered to stabilize crucial notes in the scale. (In particular, the half-holed notes a minor third and minor tenth above the seven-finger note—E♭s on an instrument considered in c'—are rendered stable by this extension.) Making a proportional expansion to bring a treble shawm down a fourth would result in an instrument almost a yard long—obviously a clumsy and inelegant solution; clearly a complete remodeling was in order. Jointed construction was “in,” as was ornamental turnery.