It must seem remarkable that a perusal of the subjects of the many papers read before this Association, since its foundation in 1874, discloses the fact that the bassoon has never received special attention. I cannot claim to address you as a professional performer, but as an amateur musician who, since childhood, has been fascinated by the bassoon. Indeed, I believe I am devoted to it much more than if it were the means of my livelihood. It has been my experience to find that musical people know little or nothing about the origin and evolution of the bassoon. Even bassoonists know little of that aspect, and I regret to say that one accomplished performer of my acquaintance, when asked if he was interested in the history of the bassoon, replied that he was more interested in its future than in its past! For the past eight years I have collected all available information at home and abroad, including photographs of surviving specimens of all ages and with the help of a selection of slides from these photographs, I hope to be able to give a very brief historical résumé.

It is a regrettable fact that the opportunities for hearing, or even for studying, the works of Joseph Haydn, still leave much to be desired, and that, in spite of the composer's popularity, to-day not more than a tenth of his music is ever played, and hardly one-third is accessible in print. The remainder is scattered through the world's libraries in manuscript, or in old, exhausted editions.

The musician can hardly take up any of the writings of those who expounded their ideas of musical theory, say, in the early days of this Association, without feeling some of the bewilderment that Alice experienced when she went through the Looking-Glass and made the acquaintance of the White Queen. The more he reads, the more perfect will he find the analogy to be.

It is unnecessary perhaps at the outset to dwell on the nature of tone quality or timbre. Most musicians nowadays are aware that this elusive characteristic has given up its secret and that what the scientist calls the ‘note’ of a musical instrument can be split up into a number of simple ‘tones’ and that it is the relative number and magnitude of these components that determines timbre; tells us, for example, why a violin and a clarinet or even two violins do not when played severally sound the same when producing a note at the same fundamental pitch. In many cases these component tones are members of the harmonic series, i.e., their frequencies bear simple ratios to the fundamental or component of lowest pitch, but again often other tones—not harmonics—intrude, whose origin is to be traced to the vibrations of the invariant parts of the instrument such as the belly of the violin or the metal tube of the trumpet and which do not alter much when the player passes from one note to another. By means of the apparatus I am about to describe this characteristic ‘formant’ of an instrument can be delineated after precise analysis of the tone quality over the whole range of performance of the instrument. A knowledge of this factor is most important to the instrument maker. By persistent analysis of this type one can, for instance, reduce the difference between a Stradivarius and a Heath Robinson—pardon the mark!—to scientific terminology and then with the co-operation of the maker take steps to improve on a specimen of poor quality, checking the extent of one's improvements as one progresses. Work of this nature on stringed instruments has been carried out by Backhaus in Germany and Saunders in the United States. At Newcastle we have been mainly concerned with organ pipes and hope to deal with the wood-wind next.