Baroque Woodwind Instruments: A Guide to Their History, Repertoire, and Basic Technique (review)

Baroque Woodwind Instruments: A Guide to Their History, Repertoire and Basic Technique. By Paul Carroll. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999. [x, 181 p. ISBN 1-85928-326-8. $65.95.]

I spend some of my time as a music librarian serving on the research committees of doctoral candidates in performance who are writing their "documents" (mini-dissertations of sixty to eighty pages). For ten semesters in a row, I taught Introduction to Music Bibliography, the course at Indiana University that is intended to prepare doctoral students for writing documents and dissertations. So I have seen a fair sampling of prose produced by performers who have--understandably--spent much more of their young(ish) lives practicing their instrument or singing than learning how to write well. I buy red pens by the dozen and patiently mark what I consider to be the shortcomings of each student's prose, whether in thinking or in language: unwarranted claims; garbled facts; illogical connections; needless repetition; awkward phrasing; errors of grammar, syntax, idiom, spelling, and punctuation; and finally--although it is the least of my concerns--errors and inconsistencies in citation style. When the student has assimilated my comments and produced another draft, we go through the exercise several more times, until I am satisfied that the product will not bring discredit to the student or the university.

Paul Carroll, the author of Baroque Woodwind Instruments, is a performer. According to the dust jacket, he is "Professor of Baroque and Classical Bassoon at The Royal College of Music, London, and Director of the period instrument ensemble Badinage." On Badinage's recordings, he plays bassoon, flute, oboe, and recorder. According to the Music Index and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, he has previously published only one short article and two reviews. Thus, in tackling this book, which he reports Ashgate asked him to write (p. vii), he was in a position similar to that of my doctoral performers when "asked" to produce a document with little previous writing experience. Like them, he demonstrates enthusiasm for his subject. Like them, he has worked long and hard to put together a large amount of material. Like them, he has produced what I would consider a creditable first draft. Alas, unlike them, he has not had a conscientious editor to help him create a creditable final version. Therefore, his book has all the shortcomings of thinking and language I mentioned above. Moreover, he has not come to terms with two basic philosophical questions in his field. Let me elaborate.

Carroll's purpose in writing the book is "to provide a guide to the history of the four main woodwind instruments of the Baroque era, the flute, oboe, recorder and bassoon, and to help those who are interested in acquiring a basic technique for playing these instruments" (p. 1). His intended audience seems to be players of modern woodwind instruments, at all levels of ability, including those daring souls who, like himself, have the ambition to play more than one baroque woodwind (pp. 8-9). He reassures readers that playing baroque instruments will not damage their modern technique ("one of the main prejudices which need to be overcome to restore balance and sanity to the world of music" [p. 8]). Although he concedes that it is far better to have a teacher than a book, he also writes, strangely, "If, however, it is not possible to gain access to a teacher then self-tuition is possible and not fraught with danger" (p. 34). His brief comments on technique are clearly based on experience and could well be helpful to teacher-less students who are heedless of the lack of danger.

To Carroll, the reason for learning baroque instruments--and therefore what the book truly aims to teach--is to play on a "faithful copy" (p. 1) of an original instrument to achieve a "historically informed performance" (p. 5). On the question of what a historically informed...