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.


In keeping with the more elegant design was a reduced wall thickness, which in turn dictated smaller fingerholes. The lowered seventh hole was now out of reach, requiring a key for the bottom c'. The loss of an effective half-hole fingering ultimately necessitated a key for e'♭ and its octave, and the similar loss of some cross-fingerings necessitated the double holes typical of Baroque oboes. Thus, while many of the details of the new instrument might have remained in flux for some time, most of its basic features were a direct consequence of lowering the pitch and must have been present as soon as it moved indoors and joined the orchestra. Marx may have been hasty in assuming that the hautbois took part in the Concert champestre de l’espoux of Lully’s Ballet de l’amour malade (it is not called for by name in the livret), but it was definitely sharing the stage with violins just a few years later in his ballet Les noces de village (1663). However, the first incontrovertible evidence of the doubling of violin lines by the hautbois dates from some years later, so that the question of the debut of the “virtual oboe” may be debated for some time to come.

Steps toward the development of the bassoon seem to have come much earlier than those documented for the oboe. By comparison to curtals of standard design, for instance, Mersenne’s examples (referred to variously — possibly indiscriminately — as fagots and bassons) have further extensions of range in the bass, although the additional keys and their covers are still of “Renaissance” design. An early seventeenth-century curtal of Italian provenance (now in Vienna) has jointed construction. (In fact, hints of both extensions of range and jointed construction can be found even earlier, in evidence from Spain and even Peru!) What appears to be the first iconographic evidence of the four-jointed bassoon (a painting from somewhere in the 1660s, attributed to Harmen Hals) comes from Holland, as does one of the first surviving examples (a bassoon by Richard Haka); as in the case of the Haka traverso mentioned above, this information has led to speculation about possible Dutch leadership in the development of the new design. Ultimately, however, all this non-French evidence will probably represent only a minor embarrassment to those upholding the traditional view that the bassoon, like the oboe, Baroque flute, and Baroque recorder, was a French invention. (The very name “bassoon” in English bespeaks a French origin, of course; Talbot calls it the “French basson.”) Once again the real issue is musical practice and the attendant question of pitch; as soon as we have a bass reed instrument capable of orchestral doubling—at low French pitch—we can regard it as effectively a bassoon regardless of the number of its joints or the layout of its thumb keys. A survey of extant curtals shows that all surviving basses are at “high” pitch (i.e., above modern). By contrast, the pitch typical of bassoons is low (although there are a few exceptions); in fact, in Germany (where both curtal and bassoon continued to overlap in use long into the next century) pitch remained one of the important distinctions between the two.

The bassoon was immediately accepted as the bass of the oboe family; it is generally subsumed under the name hautbois and only occasionally singled out for special mention. Completing the family is the taille de hautbois—traditionally called the “tenor” oboe in English but now sometimes referred to as an “alto.” This instrument, like its descendant, the modern English horn, is built in (seven-fingers) f, a fifth below the oboe proper. Two different late seventeenth-century oboe band configurations have been identified, one French, the other English; these apparently reflect the different orchestral practices of the two nations. The typical layout of Lully’s orchestra was in five parts: violin, three violas, and bass; Purcell’s was in four: two violins, viola, and bass (like a modern string quartet). The latter translates directly into an oboe band consisting of two oboes, tenor, and bassoon. Oddly enough, the French oboe band texture was also four-part, but it seems to have differed in its choice of instrument for the second part (labeled haute-contre by Lully); this part occasionally descends below the range of the oboe. (Note that in neither type of oboe band is the sackbut welcome, as it had been in the shawm band.) One of the current “hot issues” among researchers and players concerns the possible existence of a special instrument (pitched midway between oboe and taille) for the haute-contre part. Proponents of this “haute-contre theory” have cited as evidence the existence of some high-pitched tailles, the cleffing of parts, and the analogy of the differentiation in size of French violas. Much of this evidence is inconclusive; the viola analogy itself “cuts both ways,” since the tuning of the French violas is the same even though their physical size differs. Whatever the solution, it must rest on evidence from the era of the oboe itself; the earlier tradition (through the time of Mersenne) assumed an equivalence between haute-contre and taille for most instrument families, as we have seen.