The grave voice of the oboe is heard from the bassoon (Plate VI.), where, without becoming assertive, it gains a quality entirely unknown to the oboe and English horn.  It is this quality that makes the bassoon the humorist par excellence of the orchestra.  It is a reedy bass, very apt to recall to those who have had a country education the squalling tone of the homely instrument which the farmer’s boy fashions out of the stems of the pumpkin-vine.  The humor of the bassoon is an unconscious humor, and results from the use made of its abysmally solemn voice.  This solemnity in quality is paired with astonishing flexibility of utterance, so that its gambols are always grotesque.  Brahms permits the bassoon to intone the Fuchslied of the German students in his “Academic” overture.  Beethoven achieves a decidedly comical effect by a stubborn reiteration of key-note, fifth, and octave by the bassoon under a rustic dance intoned by the oboe in the scherzo of his “Pastoral” symphony; and nearly every modern composer has taken advantage of the instrument’s grotesqueness.  Mendelssohn introduces the clowns in his “Midsummer-Night’s-Dream” music by a droll dance for two bassoons over a sustained bass note from the violoncellos; but when Meyerbeer wanted a very different effect, a ghastly one indeed, in the scene of the resuscitation of the nuns in his “Robert le Diable,” he got it by taking two bassoons as solo instruments and using their weak middle tones, which, Berlioz says, have “a pale, cold, cadaverous sound.”  Singularly enough, Handel resorted to a similar device in his “Saul,” to accompany the vision of the Witch of Endor.

[Sidenote:  The double bassoon.]

In all these cases a great deal depends upon the relation between the character of the melody and the nature of the instrument to which it is set.  A swelling martial fanfare may be made absurd by changing it from trumpets to a weak-voiced wood-wind.  It is only the string quartet that speaks all the musical languages of passion and emotion.  The double-bassoon is so large an instrument that it has to be bent on itself to bring it under the control of the player.  It sounds an octave lower than the written notes.  It is not brought often into the orchestra, but speaks very much to the purpose in Brahms’s beautiful variations on a theme by Haydn, and the glorious finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

[Sidenote:  The clarinet.]

[Sidenote:  The bass clarinet.]

The clarinet (Plate VII.) is the most eloquent member of the wood-wind choir, and, except some of its own modifications or the modifications of the oboe and bassoon, the latest arrival in the harmonious company.  It is only a little more than a century old.  It has the widest range of expression of the wood-winds, and its chief structural difference is in its mouth-piece.  It has a single flat reed, which is much wider than that of the oboe or bassoon, and is fastened by a metallic