The bass clarinet in bassoon form: its history, repertoire and acoustics

This thesis explores the history, repertoire and acoustical properties of the bassoon-form bass clarinet: arguably the first successful bass clarinet type. More than 80 such instruments have been found in museums. The emphasis throughout the thesis is on understanding the empirical evidence that exists in the surviving instruments and in the musical repertoire. The establishment of this form is traced through primary and secondary sources and the extant instruments. An improved typology of the bassoon-form type is presented, based upon the acoustic properties of its different variations: true bassoon-form, bassoon-form with left- hand keys, half-bassoon-form and ophicleide form. The early repertoire for the bass clarinet is reviewed. It is shown that bassoon-form instruments (1793 onwards) and straight-form instruments (1838 onwards) were both introduced in Art music and in military and civil bands, until c.1850. The straight form then became the instrument of choice for Art music, whilst variants of the bassoon-form continued in bands until c.1914 and were probably preferred for the latter role. The main original contribution made in this thesis is to the modelling and analysis of the acoustical resonances of a set of thirteen bass clarinets, selected to examine various stages in their history. It was possible to calculate the intonation and pitch of the instruments with careful dimensional measurements, without playing them. Verification of the modelling was obtained by experimental and playing tests on one well-preserved instrument; musical examples are provided to illustrate the accuracy of the modelling. The MatlabTM code and data files are provided to allow continuation of this work. Significant acoustical differences were found between the bassoon- and straight- form instruments, primarily on the value and regularity of the important cutoff frequency. This was traced to the constraints innate in the different designs and methods of construction of the instruments. ******* IMPORTANT NOTE: This thesis is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence as indicated below. This licence does NOT apply to third party copyright material included in the thesis with permission of the copyright holders. Third party images are acknowledged as such in their figure captions; any image or music clip for which no third party copyright acknowledgement appears in the caption is copyright of the author, and is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) applied to the thesis. Please note also that the audio file below labelled "5 Trio (Bass clarinet solo) from Les Huguenots.mp3" has a standard copyright licence (NOT a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence). ******