Bassoon Reed Making: A Pedagogic History by Christin Schillinger (review)

Learning to play a musical instrument, like learning a new foreign language, requires a teacher with the expertise to provide the student with necessary feedback to bring about improvement and growth—something no manual or book, no matter how detailed, can accomplish alone. If that musical instrument has a reed, the student must be taught to deal with it in order to progress beyond the most elementary of levels of playing. The reed is a thin slice or two of Arundo donax, or cane. The clarinet's single reed is certainly a complex, precise thing, though it merely needs to vibrate against a stationary, if finely crafted, mouthpiece. A double reed, though, must be considered as complexity squared, as both pieces of cane, bound together, vibrate in interaction against each other. Students beginning to learn the bassoon will also need to learn about reed making sooner rather than later, if only to gain a sense of how to adapt and adjust a purchased reed for their own idiosyncrasies. But to achieve real proficiency on the instrument, the student must be taught the craft of reed making in great detail.

The teaching of bassoon reed making can be traced back over three hundred years, as this brief historical analysis by Christin Schillinger shows. The earliest, merely cursory mentions of bassoon reeds in print appear in musical dictionaries and broad works by, for example, Johann Joachim Quantz and Jacques Hotteterre. Over the next three centuries, however, the subject leapt forward to a highly technical, mechanical, and analytic study, as evidenced by instruction manuals of the last fifty or so years. But teachers always remain key, and in her table of contents Schillinger identifies some influential ones as a "researcher/pedagogue," "reed maker/innovator," or "artist/scholar" (p. viii).

The audience for a full-length treatment of Schillinger's very focused topic is bassoonists, from advanced beginners, say, through experienced professional performers and teachers of the instrument. Much of the text is of necessity far too technical for the general reader, as it assumes knowledge of basic reed-making techniques. (As an aside, the author correctly and consistently hyphenates "reed-making" when it is used as an adjective, but not when a noun.) Nevertheless, the non-bassoonist can learn a bit of interesting organological history from the first half of the book.

Schillinger organizes her topic into four parts: the history of bassoon pedagogy in general, the history of reed making, the history of reed-making pedagogy, and finally a study of reed-making pedagogy in twentieth-century America. In the first of these, she traces bassoon pedagogy to 1697, when Daniel Speer discussed the instrument in print, and for the first time published a fingering chart for it (Daniel Speer, Grund-richtiger, kurtz- leicht- und nöthiger, jetzt wol-vermehrter Unterricht der Musicalischen Kunst [Ulm: Georg Wilhelm Kühnen, 1697]. An earlier, much briefer version of Speer, not mentioned by Schillinger, contains a description of bassoon fingerings but no fingering chart [Daniel Speer, Grund-richtiger, kurtz- leicht- und nöthiger Unterricht Der Musicalischen Kunst (Ulm: Georg Wilhelm Kühnen, 1687), 116–118].) These earliest sources were not specific solely to the bassoon; the first treatise published that was devoted wholly to the instrument appeared in 1770 (in England, published by Longman, Lukey and Co.). Schillinger remarks that the name of the author, as well as the publication itself, has been lost (pp. 9–10); it is thus hard to understand how Paul J. White was able to reproduce a drawing of an English bassoon and include a fingering chart from the supposedly lost treatise (Paul J. White, "Early Bassoon Fingering Charts," The Galpin Society Journal 43 [March 1990]: 89). In France, the rise of the Paris Conservatoire provided a major impetus in musical pedagogy by commissioning method books for many instruments, and those for bassoon by Étienne Ozi remain influential.

Schillinger continues...