h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Daughter Iz has been accepted into the orchestra as a bassoon player. She's right chuffed!

She only started playing bassoon at the beginning of November but has made great progress. She had the audition two weeks ago, and she could play so few notes that they had difficulty finding a sight-reading piece for her to play. But even since then she has improved dramatically, and can play her 8 notes in tune with a beautiful tone. She's super-confident as well.

So now she's enrolled in the Dublin Youth Intermediate Orchestra, which should be great fun for her. The DYO offers a progression - in two years she should move in the DYO Concert and then if she's good enough in another two years into the DYO Symphony.

It'll keep her off the streets, anyway.

She won't admit it, but I'm convinced she picked to play bassoon because she knew it would be much easier to get into the orchestra than with an instrument such as the clarinet. But by now she's hooked on it and thinks it is the coolest thing ever. She's using a bassoon belonging to the music school at the moment, but at some stage we'll have to cough up the €5,000 to buy her an instrument.

Those strange squiggles were an attempt to write Euro 5,000.

Congratulations to Iz


Do you think she will take it up professionally?

5,000€? Hmmmm... I wonder how much my silver flute would be worth today...

Yep, should be much easier to get into orchestras with a bassoon - glad to hear she's doing so well!

for Iz

5,000€? (also)

Wonderful news Gnomon! Give her my congratulations too

Congratulations

I remember there was a girl who played the bassoon in the final of a BBC young musician contest a year or two ago. If it's played well, it can be quite a hypnotic solo instrument.

What a wonderful idea. Instruments are like languages, I would suspect - the more you learn, the easier it is to pick up new ones. So your girls could easily play all the instruments in a complete orchestra in a couple of years. (If it weren't so expensive!)

I've looked up what works there are for the bassoon. Apart from Mozart, who wrote only one concerto for the bassoon, (KV 191, written in 1774), the following composers are quoted by Wiki as also having written concerti:

Eckhardt-Gramatté, Gubaidulina, Hétu, Jolivet, Maxwell Davies, John Williams.

Modern music and jazz probably offer boundless opportunities for the instrument. But she'll have fun with the bassoon parts in the traditional works - they always stand out. Good choice!

And what a lovely word "Bassoon" is. I haven't heard it for years - here it's called a Fagott, which I think sounds horrid.

Hooray for Iz! I knew she'd make it!

I hope she really enjoys the Inters, an orchestra I was proud to conduct from 1985 to 1992. I worked with some wonderful players in their teenage years, including Gnomon's current recorder teacher Laoise O'Brien (she was winning every flute prize available at that time) and the (now baroque-) violinist Claire Duff.

It is true that to take up the flute or clarinet these days is virtually to deny yourself a place in an orchestra. So it goes. They take any number of strings, but four flutes is stretching things in an orchestra. We used to take six flutes and six clarinets, and still had to turn away good candidates. But we could never get enough bassoons, horns, oboes, or double basses.

When El joined the inters, there were 22 cellos, which is far too many for a good orchestra.

Congratulations to Iz ... and for being a justifiably proud Dad, Gnomon

Dear Gnoman,

congratulations to the newest member of the music world as a bassoonist. I cannot remember the tone but I seem to remember tht it is a bit mournfaul but very necessary.

You and your wife have really given so much to your two daughters. Felicitations. You may be justly proud of them.

With warm greetings.

Christiane
alsoran80

Wonderful news, Gnomon. I looked for the guide entry on bassoons but wasn't any wiser after the first two paragraphs, so I gave up and googled for pictures.