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