The Loud Bass Clarinet /////// Isabelle Ferguson

    Before I begin my short tirade, I would like to preface this by saying I do understand there are much deeper meanings behind the poems and works we read. This blog post is simply the refined word vomit drawn from my ADHD thought process. 

    There is this haunting song called "Wellerman" that has been popularized on Tik Tok. I am not personally on TikTok, but I heard this tune in the middle of a YouTube video. If I were musically talented enough, I would put "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to a tune similar to "Wellerman." The way the old man is described I think would make for an equally haunting chorus line. However, since I am not musically talented nor focused enough to do this, I am going to complain about the fact that bass clarinets are never mentioned in poems. 

    I can understand including an instrument that was literally used to blow down the walls of an ancient city.  I might see a little lee way for including the delicate piece of tin to emphasize the innocence and tranquility of whatever you are describing. If you don't get my references, I'm talking about Jericho, trumpets, flutes, and the like. However, when you include one of the strangest sounding, looking, and playing woodwinds in the entire family of non-brass wind instruments, I have to say SOMETHING. 

    The following description is written completely out of love, as I admire anyone skilled and patient enough to get a sound of a bassoon. For anyone who does not know what a bassoon is, allow me to describe the magnificence of it for you. Basically, someone took a piece of hollowed out cedar wood and chopped it into three pieces. For some reason, they added to the ends of each piece if cedar the remains of the pieces of brass used to craft a contrabass clarinet. Upon putting it back together, they then attached the keys of a bass clarinet, but in a fashion that they would have to be played similarly to a saxophone, but not entirely the same. It is all just different enough that the bassoon gets its own family of woodwind. At this point, they realized they had no idea which end of the keyed piece of cedar the sound would come out of. This led them to crush and roll the mouthpiece of the flute like it was Play-Doh until it formed the shape similar to that of the singular fuzzy picture of the Loch Ness Monster's head poking out of the water. Then, just to be extra weird, they slapped a double reed on said rolled-out Loch Ness mouthpiece. For the non-musicians, double-reed instruments are the most difficult to play and to tune, mainly due to the fact that your mouth has to be shaped as if your dentures just fell out, but you're still posing for the family photo. To top it all off, bassoons cannot be held the way a bass clarinet or trombone can be held. It has to sit in a little pocket attached to a fabric strap that you sit on for the duration of your time playing this gloriously strange mechanism. I'm not even going to get into the sound a bassoon makes, because my descriptions would never be able to do it justice. If the bassoon can make it, we all can. 

    I am at the point in my refined word vomit where I realized I described an instrument mentioned once in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," instead of complaining about how little bass clarinets are included in poems. I am going to end on a request: somebody, please, for the love of all things reed, write a sonnet with a reference to a bass clarinet. I'm begging.