Reply To: Music theory and the JoCoeuvre
Well, since I’ve been given permission… 😉
I’ll start with one statement that doesn’t even have to do with theory directly (ain’t I a stinker?):
On the other hand, Stravinski intentionally wrote the intro to “Dance of the Young Girls” in Rite of Spring as an extrememely high solo for the bassoon to make it sound strained, harsh and primal.
One could make the argument, though, that Stravinski wrote the piece while he was living in Paris, and so fully expected it to be premiered by a French orchestra. And French bassoonists would almost unilaterally have been playing bassoons with Buffet-system keywork…an instrument that is somewhat smaller and significantly more facile in the extreme high registers than the Heckel-system bassoons with which most of us are familiar. So it’s plausible that the intention of writing the solo to sound harsh never entered his mind, as it would certainly sound much less harsh on the Buffet-system instrument he was writing for.
Nonetheless, I still envision countless bassoonists singing that opening phrase over the words “I am not an English horn”. (This last joke will, of course, only be funny if you know the solo in question and also know what an English horn is.)