an oboe of larger growth, with
curved tube for convenience of manipulation. The tone of the English
horn is fuller, nobler, and is very attractive in melancholy or dreamy
music. There are few players on the English horn in this country, and
it might be set down as a rule that outside of New York, Boston, and
Chicago, the English horn parts are played by the oboe in America. No
melody displays the true character of the English horn better than the
_Ranz des Vaches_ in the overture to Rossini's "William Tell"--that
lovely Alpine song which the flute embroiders with exquisite ornament.
One of the noblest utterances of the oboe is the melody of the funeral
march in Beethoven's "Heroic" symphony, in which its tenderness has
beautiful play. It is sometimes used effectively in imitative music.
In Haydn's "Seasons," and also in that grotesque tone poem by
Saint-Saens, the "Danse Macabre," it gives the cock crow. It is the
timid oboe that sounds the A for the orchestra to tune by.

[Sidenote: _The bassoon._]

[Sidenote: _An orchestral humorist._]

[Sidenote: _Supernatural effects._]

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 "Rob