Was playing the bassoon a phallic experience for me? That long mahogany instrument, like a sleek graceful log—actually it was a long tube, doubled over–and adorned with glittering keys. I had to keep its double reed at the end of the bocal (the name for the curved metal tube) constantly wet. Sucked on, really.
I didn’t think of it that way, or not consciously anyway. I wonder now if others did. We didn’t know a word like “phallic” back then.
Why on earth was I taken with that instrument?
I recall the initial scene vividly. I was playing bass clarinet in the junior high band, having assumed that instrument after the alto clarinet and the regular clarinet, assuming those additional clarinets – and sounds— as our junior high band leader ordered and acquired instruments, expanding the little grade school orchestra he’d started with us into a large concert band with symphonic sounds. I was game for each change of instrument.
I didn’t love the bass clarinet. I could play it all right, but it was, frankly, silly-looking. (This judgment is coming from someone who found the bassoon fascinating to look at.) I was in eighth grade and at a district band festival when I saw the girl—in a navy blue dress—holding a bassoon. “What is that?” I asked her. She told me; she played a few notes.
The sound—deep, reedy, velvety, different from the hollow low tones of that bass clarinet–really lured me.
When I returned to school I asked the band director if he’d ever heard of a bassoon. That’s funny to think about. He laughed and said of course he did, was I interested? Yes, yes, I said, Could he get me one? Well, yes, he could, but he couldn’t teach me. I’d have to take private lessons. So I did, for years.
So: that’s how it happened: the beginning of my love affair with the bassoon. It seems so silly, so irrelevant, to talk about today, particularly from the stance of an old woman, which is what I am.
I was determined and devoted to that instrument – each bassoon I played, carried around, on loan to me from an institution – the junior high, the high school, the college—and then I moved on, got married, etcetera, ending the availability of bassoons. Thus I ended my bassoon-life.
Marriages took over, kids, teaching, and so on and so on. I could never afford a bassoon–they’re quite expensive– and besides, what would I do with it? There wasn’t a handy orchestra, a woodwind quintet, or a time or place to pursue it, even if I owned one.
Was it phallic? I took great pleasure, when we performed, in wearing something attractive, even sexy, in some perverse and ineffectual way to break stereotypes. I remember a red velvet sheath, for instance, that I wore for a quintet performance.
So, although I tried to look sexy, playing the bassoon was not exactly a sexy thing to be doing. Unless one considers the reed, the tongue, the entire look of the instrument.
Ha! So funny to think about. I’d love to go back to it all.