Dulcian: The Renaissance Predecessor of the Bassoon

Overview

The dulcian is a Renaissance double-reed woodwind instrument with a folded conical bore — a single piece of maple in which two parallel bores are drilled and connected at the bottom, so that the air column doubles back on itself and a long instrument can be made compact enough to hold comfortably. It is the immediate ancestor of the modern bassoon and has near-equivalent terms in most European languages: English curtal, German Dulzian, French douçaine, Dutch dulciaan, Italian dulciana, Spanish bajón, and Portuguese baixão.

The instrument flourished between roughly 1550 and 1700, although the basic concept of folding a long bore back on itself was probably devised earlier. During its peak century and a half it co-existed with — and was eventually superseded by — the new Baroque bassoon. While in active use it was played in both secular and sacred contexts throughout northern and western Europe, and it travelled with European musicians to the New World, where it remained a staple of cathedral music in the Spanish-speaking world (under its Spanish name bajón) well into the eighteenth century and beyond.

Origin and History

The dulcian seems to have come into wide use by the middle of the sixteenth century. Its appearance is closely connected to the emergence of bass-register wind instruments suitable for indoor and church use: previously, music in the bass range had to rely on the bass shawm (a powerful but rather unwieldy outdoor instrument) or on bowed string basses. By drilling two parallel bores into a single block of wood and joining them at the foot, instrument makers were able to build a bass-range double-reed instrument that was both shorter than a bass shawm and easier to handle.

A famous set of instruments in various sizes survives in Brussels, marked by a maker named Melchor and thought to be of Spanish origin. Another well-known example, slightly later, is preserved in Linz: it is leather-covered and has a built-in mute, a feature that allowed quieter indoor playing. The latest historical example commonly copied today is by Johann Christoph Denner, around 1700, also with a built-in mute. Modern copies of the Linz and Denner instruments tend to have a smoother sound and to reach high notes more easily than copies of the earliest instruments — the difference is most obvious on Denner copies.

It has been argued both ways whether the dulcian displaced the bass shawm or simply co-existed with it. The compact size of the dulcian made it more practical in many situations than the bass shawm, but the bass shawm itself appears to have emerged at about the same time as the bass dulcian, and the two instruments are often documented in the same musical environments. What is clear is that by the second half of the seventeenth century the new Baroque bassoon — built from several separable joints, with more keys and a finer-tuned bore — had begun to take over the dulcian’s roles, and by the early eighteenth century the dulcian itself had largely fallen out of use outside Iberian church music.

Construction and Materials

A dulcian is generally made from a single piece of maple. The two parallel bores are drilled and reamed first, then connected at the foot, and only then is the outside of the wood planed down to its slender, slightly tapered profile. This single-piece construction is the dulcian’s most striking technical feature and the main visual point that distinguishes it from a bassoon, which is made from several separate joints. The reed is attached to the end of a metal bocal that inserts into the top of the smaller of the two bores, just as on a bassoon.

Unlike the bassoon, the dulcian normally has a flared bell — sometimes integral to the body, sometimes made from a separate piece of timber and slipped onto the foot. This bell can be muted, the mute being either detachable or built into the instrument. Some surviving dulcians (the Linz instrument is the famous example) are covered in leather on the outside, in much the same way as the cornett of the same period. The leather covering both protects the wood and helps to seal the long parallel bores against air leaks.

The bass in F is by far the most common surviving size, but dulcians were built across a full consort. The tenor is pitched in C, the alto in F or G, and the soprano in C. Less common are a “quart bass” dulcian in C (a fourth below the standard bass) and a contrabass in F. Each instrument has a range of two and a half octaves, centred on the range of the corresponding singing voice; the bass dulcian, for instance, plays from C2 (two octaves below middle C) up to G4.

Playing Technique

A dulcian is played upright in front of the body, with the bell pointing up. The player’s fingers cover six finger holes on the front of the instrument and operate one or two keys (depending on size) for the lowest notes. The double reed sits on the end of an exposed metal bocal, so that the player can control sound, intonation, articulation, and dynamics directly through embouchure pressure and air speed.

This is a major point of difference from the other double-reed instruments contemporary with the early dulcian. On a crumhorn the reed is fully enclosed in a wind cap; on a bagpipe chanter the reed is hidden inside the chanter; on a shawm the reed is partially enclosed in a wooden disc called a pirouette. In all of these the player’s lips do not touch the reed, so the sound is largely fixed by the instrument and by air pressure alone. The dulcian’s exposed reed, by contrast, allows the kind of expressive shaping that we associate with the modern oboe and bassoon — making it a natural predecessor of the Baroque bassoon and a much more flexible solo and ensemble instrument than its wind-cap contemporaries.

The two and a half octave range of each size is enough to support a single solo voice, but in practice dulcians were often used in consorts of multiple sizes, exactly as voices are combined in a polyphonic vocal piece. A complete dulcian consort can sustain a five- or six-part polyphonic texture without recourse to other instrument families, which made it a useful resource in churches that wanted a stable wind alternative to mixed string-and-vocal scoring.

Cultural Context

The dulcian was a remarkably flexible instrument. It could be loud enough to play outdoors in a city watch band alongside shawms and sackbuts, quiet enough to function in chamber music, and expressive enough to double or replace a singing voice in a church choir. This range of dynamic and expressive possibilities made it a default choice for many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century musical situations.

In the secular sphere it played dance music and chamber music — particularly in Venice and northern Germany, where the bass dulcian was a routine partner to the shawm and sackbut. In the sacred sphere it joined the choir to support the bass line of polychoral motets, with the great polychoral repertoires of Venice and Germany — including the music of Giovanni Gabrieli and Heinrich Schütz — providing some of its most distinctive use. Explicit, named dulcian parts are preserved in the sonatas of the Venetian composer Dario Castello, where the instrument is treated with the same kind of expressive solo writing that would later become standard for the Baroque bassoon.

The dulcian travelled with the Spanish empire to the Americas, where, under its Spanish name bajón, it became a fixture of cathedral music. Latin American cathedrals continued to maintain bajón players long after the instrument had been displaced in Europe by the Baroque bassoon, and the bajón continued to support choral music there well into the eighteenth century. This colonial afterlife is a substantial part of the dulcian’s cultural footprint and one of the reasons modern players are still able to consult a deep stock of historical music written specifically for the instrument.

Notable Players and Examples

The most important institutional collections of dulcians are at the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels (which holds the famous Melchor set of soprano, G-alto, F-alto, tenor, and bass dulcians shown in the photograph that accompanies this article) and at the Museu de la Música de Barcelona (which holds a notable bajón from 1700). The Linz instrument, with its leather covering and built-in mute, is a key reference for modern makers, as is the Denner instrument from around 1700.

The modern revival of the dulcian has been driven both by historically informed performance ensembles and by individual specialists. Hans Mons’s Dulcian Home Page (one of the standard online resources for the instrument) and Maggie Kilbey’s book Curtal, Dulcian, Bajón – A History of the Precursor to the Bassoon together provide a thorough modern documentation of the instrument and its repertoire. The International Double Reed Society publishes regular articles and reviews on dulcian and bajón performance, and the instrument is now a regular voice in early-music recordings of seventeenth-century repertoire.

Comparison with Related Instruments

Compared with the modern bassoon, the dulcian is shorter, lighter, simpler in key work, and made from a single piece of wood rather than from several joints. It has a flared bell where the bassoon does not, and its tone is more direct and reedy, with less of the smooth roundness that came with the more refined bores and key work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a transitional instrument, however, it shares the bassoon’s exposed double reed, its conical bore, and its register and role.

Compared with the oboe, the dulcian is much larger and lower-pitched and uses two parallel bores rather than one straight bore, but the family relationship is unmistakable: both are double-reed conical instruments with exposed reeds and embouchure-driven control. Compared with the wind-cap double-reed instruments of its own period (the crumhorn, the rauschpfeife, the bagpipe chanter), the dulcian’s exposed reed is what makes it musically distinctive — and what allowed it, eventually, to evolve into the bassoon rather than to remain a quaint Renaissance specialty like the crumhorn.

Compared with the recorder, the other great Renaissance consort instrument, the dulcian provides a louder and more cutting alternative for outdoor use and a substantially deeper bass register. The two were often used together in mixed Renaissance consorts. Finally, although the clarinet belongs to a different acoustic family altogether (single reed, cylindrical bore, overblowing at the twelfth), it is worth noting that the clarinet emerged at the very end of the dulcian’s working life, and the two instruments together help to mark the boundary between the Renaissance and Baroque double-reed world and the more diverse single- and double-reed wind sections of the Classical orchestra.