

Musicians launch campaign to save the bassoon - BillShakespeare
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/aug/01/save-the-bassoon-campaign-endangered-instrument?CMP=fb_gu

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oinksoft
I played bassoon for years and would love to play bassoon now that I am not in
school. The trouble is that bassoons are extremely expensive. Even a terrible
plastic bassoon costs thousands of dollars, and a "good" bassoon is $20k-40k
last I checked, though you can get lucky on a used wooden one, which still
won't come cheaply. Another less important issue I think is the difficulty in
finding a good reed source: Mass-produced single reeds (clarinet, etc.) play
very well, but mass-produced double reeds are practically unplayable (a double
reed _is_ the mouthpiece so any inadequacies are glaring).

Demand for bassoonists shouldn't diminish anytime soon, the sound is a crucial
part of a symphony orchestra.

~~~
beefman
It should be possible to make many musical instruments more cheaply. The pBone
and pTrumpet prove that quality, affordable brass instruments can be made from
plastic. Bassoon should be even easier (except for the reed).

~~~
oinksoft
Brass and woodwind instruments are very different beasts though. Plastic
clarinets for instance are mostly found in marching bands due to their
inferior (brighter) sound, and those instruments are certainly not _all_
plastic. Most woodwind instruments are mechanically intricate, so I'd be
impressed if someone could make a pTrumpet version of a clarinet or bassoon
(I'd be just as impressed by a pFrenchHorn). Note the difference in sound
between a plastic and wooden recorder, one of the simplest woodwinds. I played
on a plastic bassoon for the first year, and they do not sound good at all.

~~~
stan_rogers
They don't _have_ to be horrible. Boosey & Hawkes made a particularly nice
composite clarinet (many moons ago now - I bought mine more than forty years
ago) that didn't sell particularly well, since it had the minor disadvantage
of being somewhat more expensive than a low-end wooden instrument. (It was
also heavy enough that your right thumb would notice after a long session.)
Longitudinal glass fibre and some heavy filler in the resin; it was probably a
lot more expensive to fabricate then than it would be now, especially if the
instrument has a conical rather than cylindrical bore, and I'm sure the
materials could be optimized a lot more easily on a computer rather than by
the trial-and-error of the day.

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analog31
Just a personal observation, the instruments that are typically identified as
"endangered," are all ridiculously hard to learn as an adult, even if you've
played another instrument. Bassoon has bizarre fingerings compared to the
other woodwinds. Viola has that damned clef. Double bass is physically
dangerous to play. French horn is just hard.

~~~
cynicalkane
I've played the violin and the viola. If you're a violinist you can get a good
sound out of the viola after literally a few minutes of practice. Reading the
viola clef is strictly less difficult than reading the transposing clefs used
by brass and winds.

I don't know what "the double bass is physically dangerous to play" means. If
you mean you can get RSI from it, you can do that on any instrument.

~~~
analog31
That's true. And approaches to each instrument, to avoid injury, have become a
pretty mainstream part of teaching.

I actually suspect that bass isn't all that endangered, and that it has had
somewhat of a resurgence. There were quite a few kids playing bass at the
school string concerts that my kids play in.

Of course bass has the problem of being every parent's nightmare due to its
size. ;-)

For me, the endangered-ness of the bass, at the time, was a blessing because
it meant that I could serve a role in an ensemble without being a virtuoso.

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riffraff
> “At the moment, only about 1% of people on the street can even recognise
> this instrument,”

does this mean "look at this object, and guess what it is", or "recognize this
sound" ?

I'd expect a lot of people to be familiar with "the sorcerer's apprentice" due
to Fantasia (contrabassoon, I believe).

On the other hand, I consider myself a normally educated person with no
musical culture, and I wouldn't be able to tell the name of most musical
instruments.

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afsina
I do not want to sound mean but perhaps the name "Faggot" is one of the cause
of alienation.

~~~
mattlutze
It comes from the Italian "fagotto," and those languages that use the Italian
form (instead of the French/English "basson/bassoon") have a different word
for the pejorative you're inferring. Also, it'll be spelled with one "g", not
two.

If you say "Ich hasse das Fagott" to a German they'll know you're opining on
woodwinds and not confused whether you're insulting a homosexual.

~~~
afsina
Thanks, I got confused because in Wikipedia disambiguation page it says
"Bassoon, variously called fagotto, faggot, fagott, fagot".

~~~
mattlutze
I'd be mildly curious to know which language spells it with two "g"s; I've
only ever seen it with one.

