Instruments
Bassoon
The bassoon is the bass (lowest) instrument of the woodwind section of the classical orchestra. It is a holed and keyed tube, between four and five feet long and shaped like a plant stalk gradually separating in two, with one branch shorter than the other; out of the shorter side grows the "bocal," a question-mark neck to which is attached the instrument's fussy double bamboo reed. The bassoon is known as one of the most difficult of all instruments to play. With a large Renaissance reed instrument called a dulcian as a direct ancestor, the bassoon came into its own in seventeenth-century France. Telemann was one of the first composers to write for it idiomatically. Nineteenth-century innovations in instrument building increased instrument's range of tones and colors. The gentle bass voice of the bassoon has found limited applications indeed in the pop and jazz spheres, except in ensembles that directly derive from the classical orchestra.