I didn’t know the bassoon was so cool.
When I was in third grade, my mother and I visited my school one evening to select my musical instrument
Music in Blackstone, Massachusetts, where I grew up, was a big deal.
Everyone played an instrument.
Instruments were displayed on tables throughout the cafeteria. Parents and students were invited to visit each table and try them out. I was drawn to the drums and trumpet, but my mother bypassed every instrument, insisting on the flute.
She said she wanted me to play “a quiet instrument.”
As a result, I became the only male flute player in my school, which would’ve been fantastic had I been a super confident boy who was into girls, but I was a sub-human third grade boy who couldn’t eat without getting food on my shirt. I was still forgetting to put on underwear in the morning.
Confidence and attraction to girls would come much later.
Instead, I grudgingly took lessons with girls, sat amongst them in band rehearsal, and was relentlessly teased by the boys in my grade for my flute.
In seventh grade – high school in my town – our band director, Russ Arnold, began rehearsal one day by announcing that the school’s first bassoon had arrived. He wanted to know if anyone was willing to switch instruments and give it a try.
My hand shot into the air. I didn’t know what a bassoon was or even what it looked like, but I would’ve played almost anything if I could abandon the flute.
The bassoon wasn’t the coolest instrument in the world, but it got me out of the flute section of the band and planted me beside my friend, Danny, who played the bass clarinet. Danny and I would sit side by side for much of my high school career.
I was in heaven.
Even better, the bassoon can’t be played while marching, so during marching band season, I was moved over to the drum corp, finally getting to play the instrument I had wanted to play way back in third grade. In my six years as a member of the marching band, I played the bass drum, quads, and a host of percussive instruments in the pit.
I was never an excellent drummer, but I became a very competent drummer and eventually a leader in our drum corp.
Marching band in Blackstone, Massachusetts was serious business. Though we has no football team or football field, we were a world class marching band, practicing on a parking lot marked up to look like a football field. Over the course of my marching band career, I marched in the Macy’s Day Parade, the Rose Bowl Parade, and down Main Street in Disney World. We won six Massachusetts championships and two New England championships.
It was one of the best times of my life.
Today I still know all the fingerings for the flute and can play it poorly.
I never fell in love with the bassoon but played it well enough that I remained the school’s one and only bassoon player for five years.
Had I known that the bassoon could sound like this, perhaps I would’ve made a much greater commitment to it. Little did I know that an instrument as strange looking as the bassoon could sound so good.