Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/765

OBOE 707 Mahillon of Brussels, and reconstructed with the improve ments of modern manufacture. After the 16th century we find the instruments which were designated by the name of "gros bois," the (5) and (6) of Prae- torius, transformed into shorter instruments, the fagott and contra- Fa<*ott. fa^ott ; so called because the column of air, the same as in the po^mer, was formed of two conical tubes which communicated with the lower part of the instrument, and were pierced in a single piece of wood. It is probably owing to the aspect of this double pipe that the satirical name of fagot was given, preserved in Italian as fagotto, and in German as fagott. A canon of Ferrara named Afranio has been cited as the author of the transformation, about 1539, of the bass pommer, but Count Valdrighi, the curator of the Estense library, 1 and "Wasielewski, 2 who has reproduced the draw ing of Afranio s invention, deprive him of the merit of the innova tion. The fagottino is transformed in the same fashion. Bassoon. Sigismund Scheitzer of Nuremberg acquired a great reputation in the 16th centnry for making the "basson," a French word sub stituted for the old fagot, and adopted in England as bassoon. His instrument had only two keys, ^ ^~~ I ^ e cann t tell when the bassoon gained its present form, but it was probably at the end of the 17th century. It was made in exactly the same style as the fagottino represented in fig. 5. It appeared for the first time FIG. 5. The Fagottino, at the beginning of the 17th century. in the orchestra with the oboe in Pomonc (1671). It had three keys The Bb key rendering a lengthening then, of the instrument necessary, we may suppose it took its modern form at that epoch. The fourth key, gj -i, dates from 1751. The bassoon appears with four keys in the EncyclopSdie of Diderot and D Alembert (Paris, 1751-65). The number of keys increased by the beginning of the present century to eight, viz., ^$J3, an ^- two keys to facilitate the pro- duction of acute harmonics. It has since been improved by Almen- rader in Germany, Savari, and more recently Triebert and Goumas, Paris, and C. Mahillon, Brussels. The reform in the construction of the flute due to Theobald Boehm of Munich about 1840, a reform which principally consisted in the rational division of the tube by the position of the lateral holes, prompted Triebert to try to adapt the innovation to the oboes and bassoons ; but he failed, because the application of it denaturalized the timbre of the instruments, which it was necessary, before all things, to preserve. But his efforts did not remain sterile. In 1856 a French bandmaster, M. Sarrus, thought out the construc tion of a family of brass instruments ^ ith conical tubes pierced at regular distances, which, diminishing the length of the air column, has rendered a series of fundamental sounds easy, more equal and free in timbre than that of the oboe family. Gautrot of Paris realized the inventor s idea, and, under the name of "sarrusophones," has created a complete family, from the sopranino in Eb to the con trabass in Bb, of which his firm preserves the monopoly. In 1868 the firm of C. Mahillon, Brussels, produced a reed con trabass of metal, destined to replace the old contrabassoon of wood, since much used in orchestras and military bands. The first idea of this instrument goes back to 1839, and is attributed to Schb ll- nast and Son of Pressburg. It is a conical brass tube of very large proportions, with lateral holes placed as theory demands, in geo metrical relation, with a diameter almost equal to the section of the tube at the point where the hole is cut. From this it results that for each sound one key only is required, and the seventeen keys give the player almost the facility of a keyboard. The com pass written for this contrabass is comprised between and but sounds an octave lower. 1 Musurgiana, II phagotus d Afranio. 2 Geschichte der Instrumentalmusik im &en Jahrhundert. We now turn to another kind of reed and its association with Clarinet two kinds of cylindrical and conical pipes, the beating reed, which is formed of a single tongue, and engenders vibrations in the column of air to which it is applied by the contact of the tongue with the frame of a groove to which it is adapted. The beating reed, though not having the extreme antiquity of the double reed, was used at a very early period, for we find it applied to the chalumeaus of ancient Egypt, still in use under the name of arghoul, to the Greek auloi, and the Roman tibiie. 3 The beating reed is a piece of reed growth, closed at the upper end by the natural knot, beneath which a tongue is partly detached by a longitudinal slit. We do not see the probable operation of chance so clearly here as in the double reed. It may have been the inconvenience resulting from the employment of double-tongued reeds of large dimensions to make cylindrical pipes of a certain diameter speak that urged the invention of a more commodious substitute. With double auloi it would have been almost im possible to blow two double reeds at one time, while, on the contrary, it is easy to sound two pipes furnished with beating reeds introduced simultaneously into the player s mouth. Such as these are the actual Egyptian arghoul and zummdrah. It is in the beating reed and cylindrical tube, a combination bequeathed to us by remote antiquity, that we find the principle of one of the leading instruments of the modern orchestra, the clarinet or clarionet. The European chalumeau of the Middle Ages, in English " shawm," differed but little from the ancient Egyptian chalumeau: its tube was of wood, and the upper part of the tube communicated with the bore by an opening made laterally and longitudinally, on the edges of which the reed-tongue was bound by repeated turns of string. Neither in the Middle Ages nor in the 16th century do we find the chalumeau much employed. Prretorius, Avho in his Thcatrum instrumcntorum has given exact drawings of the instru ments he knew, does not cite the chalumeau. But there exists in the fine collection of the Liceo Musicale at Bologna a double chalu meau of wood covered with leather, the make of which takes it back to the 16th century. Drawings of this instrument occur in the Encydopidie of Diderot and D Alembert, and in the Muzykaal Kunstwoordenboek of J. Verschure-Eeynvaan (Amsterdam, 1795). The chalumeau was pierced with eight holes and with two keys, and produced the following series of fundamental sounds FIG. 6. The Chalumeau. 5 7 8 key key The present writer has had the good fortune to find quite re cently two examples in the National Museum at Munich, and has been kindly authorized by Herr von Hefner-Alteneck, director of the museum, to reproduce them for the museum of the conserva toire at Brussels. For one of these see fig. 6. It is from this reproduction that he has been enabled to determine the exact nature of the improvement of the chalumeau, about 1690, by Christopher Denner of Nuremberg, an improvement which has gained for him the reputation of having invented the clarinet. Every clarinet player knows that it is sufficient for one of the upper keys not to quite close the hole for it to produce, instead of the fundamental sound, the interval of the twelfth above it, in other words, the second partial. This phenomenon is easily explained : the communication between the external air and the upper part of the air -column in the instrument forms a ventral segment or loop of vibration and forces the column to divide, and, as a cylindrical pipe affected by a reed sounds harmonically after the manner of stopped pipes, the possible par tial after the fundamental is naturally the second. This pheno menon must have struck Denner, and have suggested to him the idea of obtaining the same result according to a regular manner and at the will of the executant. He arrived at it by raising a little the key governed by the thumb of the left hand, which when opened conjointly with the A key produced the Bb of the chalumeau. This change of position of the key did not hinder the production of the Bb, but doubled at one stroke the extent of compass of the instrument in giving it the following notes This was Denner s in- 012 3 4 5 6 7 8 key vention he did not invent the clarinet, but he was the first to make use of the artifice already referred to which permits instru ments of cylindrical bore to produce fundamental sounds and their twelfths. 3 F. A. Gevaert, Histoire de la musique dans Vantiquite.